The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		5.0
Video		3.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		5.0

The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 16, 2024

The Flaming Lips may be an object example for any musicians out there that if you persevere long enough, maybe someday your efforts may finally get noticed. While this astounding sounding new audio Blu-ray (with a definite visual component in more ways than one, as will be discussed below) is touted as the "20th Anniversary Edition", the original album actually came out in 2002, and rather incredibly, at least given its renown in the admittedly probably lesser known overall context of knowledge about The Flaming Lips in general, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was actually the tenth album from the band, one which itself came some twenty or so years after the band's founding in 1983. If some of The Flaming Lips' subsequent albums like At War With the Mystics, Embryonic and/or The Terror may well have charted higher than Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (which got up to Number 50 on Billboard's album chart), the influence of this particular album among aficionados can hardly be understated. This is often elegantly crafted music that also frequently defies categorization (one reason why the band may not have had the kind of "overnight sensation" status of so many flash in the pan groups), and it also has a decidedly experimental edge that translates especially well to an Atmos presentation.

The production finesse of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is, along with its uniformly interesting songcraft, one of its signal achievements, and some of the undeniably psychedelic effects that are kind of like the Millennial version of Musique concrète seem almost tailor made for the whirling, swirling world of surround audio. That may make the audio side of things on this disc of prime interest to those either with a fondness for the band or simply curious about what a really winning Atmos mix can sound like, but commendably Warner Records also provides some video content as well. The "traditional" side of things is a collection of music videos, but kind of perfectly, at least in the almost retro way the album's music often seems to evoke, there's a really fun "responsive" pulsing video accompanying the actual music that kind of mimics how sound activated RGB lights can "dance" to the music (see the odd numbered screenshots for examples of what displays when tunes are playing). The insert booklet refers to this "play along" elements as "Animated Visualizer Bleep Blops", redigitized by Blake Studdard.

The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Warner Records with an MPEG-2 encoded 1080i transfer that is in 1.78:1 for the "responsive" video content that accompanies the actual album, and in a variety of aspect ratios for the music videos. The music videos are products of their time and are obvious (and at times pretty problematic looking) upscales. There are any number of the "usual suspect" bugaboos throughout the music videos, including lots of noise, macroblocking and pixellation, which, when combined with an inherently hallucinogenic approach, tends to not offer a ton of detail. The "responsive" video has an intentionally retro appearance, but offers some really nice suffusion as the various blobs and other shapes pulse and vibrate around the frame. My advice is to "view" this as basically an audio Blu-ray that also offers a few video bells and whistles added for a bit of extra fun.

The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots features three fantastic sounding audio options, Dolby Atmos (mixed by Dave Fridmann), DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (mixed by Dave Fridmann and Elliot Scheiner) and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (mixed by Dave Fridmann). It's actually kind of surprising that this album evidently never got an SACD treatment, though maybe a little hilariously it looks like there was a DVD with a 5.1 surround mix back in the veritable Dark Ages. One way or the other, as mentioned above, this album seems positively engineered (no pun intended) for the kind of immersion that both the Dolby Atmos and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks on this disc in particular can offer. You can hear surround activity from the get go, with the kind of cacophonous "sound effect" opening, but continuing on through any number of other interstitial moments where everything from near white noise to daffier discretely channeled effects dot the side and rear channels. That's all fine and good, of course, but the music is also almost constantly "all over the place", not just stylistically, but around all of the surround channels. Vocals can waft from the front channels to the rear and back again, instruments can appear fleetingly in a rear left channel only to reappear again toward the front, and all sorts of the whimsical "and the rest" elements like occasional spoken moments and the like clearly emanate from discrete channels throughout the presentation. I've been reviewing an absolutely wonderful array of audio Blu-rays lately, but I have to say this was one of the most fun Atmos listening experiences I've had recently.

The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Music Videos (HD; 20:12) are authored together, but are ostensibly playable separately per the menu. What actually happens is the entire video compilation will start from whatever song is chosen (I've listed the starting times below), and then continue on through to the others, if any.

  Flight Test

  
  

  Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1 begins at 3:51.

  
  

  Are You a Hypnotist? begins at 7:30.

  
  

  Do You Realize?? begins at 12:15.

  
  

  Do You Realize?? (Mark Pellington Version) begins at 15:49.

The keepcase features a sleeve with an inner print, and encloses a fun insert booklet with a great conversation between Dave Fridmann and who I'm assuming is Wayne Coyne, even if the introduction lists him as Jon (?). Fridmann helpfully clarifies that it's "elves" that allow Atmos tracks to properly scale to whatever your speaker setup may be.

The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Rather interestingly, none other than Aaron Sorkin was evidently attached to help musicalize (as in a stage adaptation) this album, though it seems like he parted ways with the project before it got a production at the La Jolla Playhouse many years ago. The stage adaptation actually sounds kind of weird in any case, especially since this psychedelically tinged album may be able to conjure up its own visions even without Animated Visualizer Bleep Blops. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was an ingratiating audio surprise for me, and this release easily comes Highly recommended.