Tiny Giants 3D Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Tiny Giants 3D Blu-ray Movie Review

A solid 3D doc, although I recommend picking up BBC's 'Hidden Kingdoms' instead...

Reviewed by Kenneth Brown April 7, 2015

BBC Home Entertainment is dipping its toe in the 3D Blu-ray waters... just as the majority of studios are scrambling to get out of the pool. There was the December 2013 release of Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, BBC's only notable 3D title to date, but it seems little else has lent itself to the format. Until now. Enter Planet Dinosaur, Tiny Giants and Wings, a trio of natural history documentaries hinging their 3D bets on some additional pop and visual punch. Unfortunately, despite each documentary boasting (varied) value, there are a few caveats. Planet Dinosaur is new to Blu-ray, but Wings is simply a re-release of Winged Planet 3D (available since March 2014 as a Best Buy exclusive), while Tiny Giants is essentially a truncated, 43-minute cut of two episodes of BBC's three-hour Hidden Kingdoms series, available since July 2014 (and at its current price, a steal). None of it amounts to a deal-breaker. Consumers and 3D enthusiasts may just want to check their collections and consider every angle before making a purchase.

The producers of Life and Planet Earth share this spectacular ground-level view of the smallest wonders of the natural world. Unless you've been an ant or an earthworm in a previous life, you've never seen anything like this. Immerse yourself in a terrifically fascinating place, where small creatures face titanic battles to survive. Special 3D cameras capture the larger than life adventures of Earth's littlest heroes. Featuring a stirring musical score by composer Ben Foster (The Theory of Everything) and narrated by Stephen Fry, it's the story of two tiny animals coming of age. In the wild woods of North America, a young chipmunk is gathering a vital store of nuts ahead of his first winter. In his way are ruthless rivals and giant predators. Then, in the venomous American west, a grasshopper mouse confronts the desert's deadliest creatures to stake a claim of his own.

Fun, fascinating and light on its feet, executive producer Mike Gutton's original Hidden Kingdoms remains an all-ages documentary told from the wildly entertaining perspective of some of the planet's smallest masters of survival. Tiny Giants is 134-minutes shorter, focusing solely on the brave, owl-dodging grasshopper mouse from the series' first episode and the feisty, nut-gathering chipmunk from the second via a seamless re-edit. (Gone are Kingdoms' baby elephant shrew, marmoset, tree shrew and rhinoceros beetle.) In some ways, the bite-sized, single-episode format is better suited to the film's family friendly sensibilities. Young kids will find it to be a brisker, more entertaining ride, easily absorbed in one sitting, and the featured animals just so happen to be the two most memorable creatures from the series. Even without the full 180-minute shebang, there's a great deal of amazing sights and pint-sized wonders to be had.

Shot using a variety of techniques, Tiny Giants isn't a pure natural history documentary, at least not in the traditional sense. The BBC Natural History Unit filmmakers employ somewhat controversial, albeit limited uses of compositing, artificial environments and other clever sleight of hand. Thankfully, it's judicious trickery, allowing the film to be the dazzling, dizzying tour of desert trails and forest underbrush it's meant to be. And with two memorable leading animals, the NHU's careful implementation of high-speed photography and other tools of the trade, as well as its eye for authenticity, provides welcome insight into a world that often goes unnoticed and unexplored, allowing the team to weave a tale as delightful as it is compelling, amusing as it is moving, and engaging as it is educational.

Once more serious natural history aficionados get past the film's cutesy, kid-oriented touches (the occasional use of light, cartoonish sound effects chief among them), they'll find it more difficult to deny the infectious appeal of the featured animals' misadventures and perilous journeys. Some of the anthropomorphic gags and narrative magic are completely manufactured, sure. But it's always in keeping with the spirit of discovery, and rarely betrays whatever creature scampers into the spotlight. Stephen Fry's wry narration only helps, as does the exceedingly effective sense of size, scale, scope, perspective and speed. The filmmakers are the first to admit it sometimes relies on more approximation than revelation, but it's as close as anyone could possibly come to capturing the day to day joys and struggles of Tiny Giants... erm, tiny giants.

Tiny Giants 3D Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Tiny Giants 3D boasts the best 1080p/MVC-encoded video presentation of the three BBC 3D documentaries, though it isn't without a small handful of issues. Some aliasing creeps in, typically appearing along the chipmunk's whiskers during extreme close-ups, and noise and other inherent anomalies are present. The 3D experience also struggles with a few shots of leafy forest floors; displays that are prone to crosstalk will exhibit some noticeable ghosting. Fortunately, none of it proves all that distracting. Colors are bright and vivid, the rich greens and oranges of the forest and the desolate, sun-seared whites and browns of the desert are captured nicely, black levels are deep and satisfying, and delineation is excellent, offering suitably revealing glimpses into the darkness (without anything in the way of significant crush). Detail is quite good too, and only hindered by the limitations of the photography itself. Edges are crisp and clean, textures and fur are well-resolved, and the softness that appears isn't a product of the encode. Artifacting, banding, ringing and other anomalies are held at bay too, and the 3D experience delivers solid and rather consistent depth and dimensionality, without any major mishaps.

Tiny Giants 3D Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

There's little to complain about when it comes to Tiny Giant's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track, other than the nature of its too-cute-for-its-own-good sound design. Stephen Fry's narration is prioritized above all, as is par for the course, and ambient effects are able-bodied, even if the majority are faint and fleeting. LFE output follows suit -- capable but restrained -- as does rear speaker activity and directionally, each of which are precise yet not entirely remarkable. None of that is to suggest there's something wrong with BBC's lossless track. There isn't. It simply gets the job done, thankless as that job tends to be.

Tiny Giants 3D Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Hidden Kingdoms Revealed: The Making of Tiny Giants 3D (HD, 9 minutes): Curious how the BBC Natural History Unit photographers captured and created some of the documentary's most striking shots? This short but revealing behind-the-scenes featurette details key techniques and tricks of the trade the film team utilized to shoot footage from such unique perspectives. (Note: this extra is a shorter, recut version of the 3-episode, 30-minute "Hidden Kingdoms Revealed" featurette included on the July 2014 Blu-ray release of Hidden Kingdoms.)

Tiny Giants 3D Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

While the Blu-ray release of Hidden Kingdoms is by far the more value-packed BD (especially at its current price), the truncated Tiny Giants film offers enough 3D oomph and excitement to warrant consideration. Its video presentation is terrific, the 3D experience is a nice treat, and the film's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is up to the task.