Rating summary

Movie		5.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Won't You Be My Neighbor? Blu-ray Movie Review

Love your neighbor and love yourself.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman September 6, 2018

Fred Rogers shared wisdom, not knowledge, with his audience. Understanding math, science, letters, history, things of that nature -- things often learned in the classroom -- are important, but knowing oneself, loving oneself, believing in one's innate worth and the worth of others just might be more powerful life tools than anything a textbook could ever teach. Director Morgan Neville's (20 Feet from Stardom) Won't You Be My Neighbor? crafts a moving tribute to a man and the wisdom that shaped generations and could change even today's world if anyone would be bold enough to slow down and listen to Mr. Rogers one more time.

The film explores the life of popular television host Fred Rogers, an ordained minster and man of faith who delayed his studies in the seminary to focus on a career in the burgeoning television market. In the television he saw an opportunity to communicate with children, to offer them something other than slapstick antics and other forms of vapid "entertainment." He saw in television the opportunity to share "a singular vision of kindness and love." The Latrobe, Pennsylvania native began his life's work on Pittsburgh's WQED, a publicly funded station, with the program The Children's Corner. He was quickly left unsatisfied with the show's direction. After a respite from the medium and a return to studying his faith, he returned to the airwaves with Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and quickly found his stride with the program. The show’s relaxing pace and absence of loud noises and reliance on occasional silence, contrary to the fast motion and frenetic sounds of other tv shows, distinguished his from others. Rather than unwholesome or even dangerous antics and entertainment, the show taught children to respect themselves, to accept others as they are, shared the values of friendship and kindness, and was unafraid of dealing with the world’s great challenges head-on. The film explores the show's place in history, its cultural impact, and Rogers' life beyond the camera.

Fred Rogers is the film's subject but his ideas are its heart and soul. The film explores his "respect" for childhood, for the process of growing up and growing up right, instilling positive values and doing so with real feelings and genuine emotions. Rogers was never afraid to tackle subjects such as self worth and the ills of the world (everything from The Challenger space shuttle disaster to political assassinations) head-on, but he did so in a way that never elevated himself above the lesson. Many of the show's most intimate discussions seemed as much for his own well-being as that of the children, as he used his mediums -- his puppets, his voice -- to soul search and attempt to understand the world alongside the children, not from a position above. He used his platform to protest increasingly violent and vapid childhood entertainment. Children need “adults who will protect them from the ever-ready molders of their world,” he said, condemning the negative sights and sounds and working to mold and fill young minds with positivity, to grow from the inside out, to live lives filled with love and understanding the value of oneself and others alike. “What is essential in life is invisible to the eye," he says in the film, championing wholesome hearts, minds, and spirits above the externalities the world promotes.

Through interviews with his surviving family and co-stars, as well as candid chats with Rogers himself in archival footage, the film offers a compelling look into his private life, from the foundations of his sprawling imagination as a sickly boy who spent much time in bed alone to how he would carry over voices from the show into family conversation to help identify where he was coming from, emotionally, when having an important discussion. He learned to express himself through piano play and ultimately came to identify with the puppet Daniel, who would serve as, essentially, his true inner voice on the show (eventually being replaced by King Friday XIII). The film unearths a few humorous anecdotes from the set and engages the criticisms Rogers faced through his life and particularly as the generation that grew up watching him grew into adults. The ultimate takeaway, though, is that Fred Rogers was not a man interested in self promotion, of raising his status. His focus was on the children: forming and friending children was his life's calling, which he followed well into retirement and even to his death.

Won't You Be My Neighbor? Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Won't You Be My Neighbor? arrives on Blu-ray with a well rounded 1080p transfer. The film is cobbled together from various sources, including plenty of old, vintage clips and reels, color and black-and-white, which are of varying quality, besieged by the warts of age, but they are critical textures in shaping the story of the man at the center of it through the decades. Film and video, relatively clean or littered with wear-and-tear, the image is in many ways a comfortable rewind through the years and reliving childhood memories, a prism through which the innate flaws disappear into nostalgia and purpose. Many newly minted interviews, digitally captured, present with impressive stability, clarity, attention to detail, and color. This is one of those Blu-ray releases that necessarily transcends traditional video quality analysis. It's fine as it is, technically imperfect but perfectly presentable within the film's, and history's, context.

Won't You Be My Neighbor? Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Won't You Be My Neighbor? features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack but it rarely, really never, engages the surround channels. The film's audio needs are sparse, requiring good, clear, well-prioritized dialogue as its essential sound component, which this track does deliver, whether crisp new interviews or somewhat scratchy vintage show clips or interviews snippets. Musical delivery satisfies with fine essential definition and front-end width. A few light supportive effects, often within the show's clips and presenting with limited clarity and range, help define a few scenes, but this one is understandably driven first and foremost by the spoken word.

Won't You Be My Neighbor? Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Won't You Be My Neighbor?'s Blu-ray release contains no supplemental content. The film begins playback immediately upon disc insertion. No top menu is included. The pop-up menu offers only an opportunity to toggle subtitles on and off. No DVD or digital versions are included. The release does not ship with a slipcover, though the DVD does.

Won't You Be My Neighbor? Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There appears to be a yearning for a Fred Rogers revival in the air. Not only was Won't You Be My Neighbor? a well-received Documentary on the famous children's television host, but a movie called You Are My Friend starring Tom Hanks is in the works (the Oscar-winning actor was recently sighted in and around Western Pennsylvania, purportedly doing a bit of research in advance of the shoot). And there's a good reason for that yearning. Here's a man who is the antithesis of everything that's come to define the world in his absence: a man with a good heart, a wholesome message, sharing simple life lessons by way of a reliably pleasant demeanor. The next time the world seems blue and bleak, whether that's the larger physical world or one's most private and innermost being, remember Fred Rogers. Remember not the tentacles of life and the suffocating grasp of today's relentlessly dim world but the warm embrace of a hug and the kind reminder that it can again be a beautiful day in the neighborhood if minds and spirits and hearts were filled with positive, rather than negative, reinforcements. Universal's featureless Blu-ray delivers just-fine video and audio. Very highly recommended. 143.