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Friday, June 5, 2009

BD impressions: A Bug's Life

12:50 PM / BD Impressions / 3 Comments

A Bug's Life was Pixar's second feature and one that was a good deal more ambitious in terms of scale and scope than its predecessor, Toy Story. Ironically, while Toy Story looks rather dated nowadays, this is less obvious than with A Bug's Life. I put this down to the subject matter: whereas the various characters of Toy Story were made of materials like plastic and wood - ideally suited to CGI - A Bug's Life takes place in the natural world, and the technology of 1998 simply wasn't sufficiently advanced for the artists to be able to make the characters or settings feel organic. As a result, there's something slightly off-putting about seeing this crystal-clear presentation of such (by today's standards) primitive graphics.

In other words, it's a really great transfer that faithfully captures the look of the source material. Detail levels are impeccable, with not a hint of filtering or edge enhancement. Given that the image was transferred straight from the original computer files without ever touching celluloid (A Bug's Life was, incidentally, the first movie ever to receive a straight digital-to-digital transfer on DVD), there's no grain whatsoever, which only serves to heighten the artificiality of the visuals. With later films, Pixar would perfect concepts such as focus and depth of field, making this less of an issue. Alas, the rainstorm during the film's climax proves to be too much for the encoder to handle, and it ends up choking on the frenetic action and falling drops of rain (see Example 14). The blocking in these shots is distracting, but is really the only negative thing I can say about this encode. 9/10

A Bug's Life
studio: Buena Vista; country: USA; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 21.2 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 32 Mbit/sec

3 Comments

 
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