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Friday, June 5, 2009

BD capsule review: A Bug's Life

12:05 PM / Reviews / No Comments

Operating under the assumption that not everyone wants to read a DVD or BD review of several thousand words, and indeed that not every film or disc requires such an essay, DVD Times recently started a series of "capsule reviews" - shorter write-ups of a few hundred words which give readers the gist of what they can expect without bogging them down with the nitty-gritty details. While I wouldn't like to see longer reviews disappear completely, I for one think this is an excellent way of getting more content covered without undermining the site's reputation for high quality coverage of a wide variety of films.

For my first capsule review, I've taken a look at Disney's recent Region ABC (US) release of A Bug's Life:

In retrospect, it seems bizarre that, during development, A Bug's Life was intended to be the studio's "A" picture, with its stablemate Toy Story 2 initially intended to be a cheap direct-to-video project. Indeed, Pixar's sophomore effort, a loose re-working of Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai, remains their least impressive offering to date. This should not be inferred in any way to be a dismissal: the Emeryville CGI house's worst is still considerably better than most studios' best. A Bug's Life, however, had the misfortune of being beaten to the post by a matter of months by rival DreamWorks' Antz, a suspiciously similar-looking tale about a colony of ants under threat that was actually devised after Pixar's film but rushed out the door ahead of it. A Bug's Life, with its bright hues, colourful array of child-friendly characters and patented Pixar humour, is by far the more aesthetically pleasing of the two...

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