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Sunday, June 14, 2009

BD impressions: Monsters, Inc.

12:41 PM / BD Impressions / 2 Comments

Rewatching Monsters, Inc. last night for the first time in a few years, my brother commented about how "overbearing" the film felt at times. I'm inclined to agree: this is the most frenetic of Pixar's films in terms of its pacing and wall-to-wall dialogue. There really isn't a single moment of calmness or silence until just before the closing credits roll, and there's something a little exhausting about it. I tend to view this as Pixar's most DreamWorks-like film, in that it's heavily reliant on dialogue, with the story almost seeming to take a back seat. It's still an infinitely superior film to anything DreamWorks has made so far, though - the similarities are in tone rather than quality.

I'd previously pegged this as middle-tier Pixar - above Cars and A Bug's Life, about the same as Toy Story 2 and below Toy Story, The Incredibles, Wall-E, Finding Nemo and Ratatouille - and while I'd still place it in more or less the same position in the Pixar canon, my appreciation of it did raise itself just a little overall. Pete Docter's sensibility is a little more cartoony than that of his fellow Pixar directors Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton, and most of this film's success stems from the fact that it's just plain good fun. To a certain extent it lacks the complexity of the studio's "A" material, as well as some of the emotional punch (it's telling, I think, that Docter frames Sully's fear that Boo has been mangled in the garbage compactor as a joke rather than playing it straight), but when a film is this fun I'm tempted to say it doesn't matter.

Visually, the disc is terrific. (And aurally too - the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is a delight.) The sheer amount of detail packed into each frame is probably the highest I've ever seen on a BD. Just look at Sully: even in wide shots you can see practically every individual blade of hair! This was before Pixar had perfected camera focus and depth of field (although they do play with it a little here and there), and while this may case the film to look slightly more artificial than something like Ratatouille or Wall-E, at the same time it makes it easier for the viewer to appreciate just how much detail you can actually pack into the disc's 1920x1080 resolution. It also makes some of the shortcomings of the technology back in 2001 more apparent: for instance, what appears to be a lack of anti-aliasing on some diagonal edges in Example 4, and the flatness of the texturing on Roz's face in Example 10. Compression is handled extremely well for the most part, with the Himalayas blizzard sequence actually holding up better than I expected (see Example 14). Unfortunately, the complexity of the "doors chase" prior to the climax proves to be a little too much for the encoder to cope with, with some mild but visible compression artefacts detectable in a number of shots (see Example 17, paying particular attention to the upper right hand corner). Were it not for these, I feel confident that Monsters, Inc. would have risen to the very top of the "Shot Digitally" list on the HD Image Quality Rankings page. As it is, it's a stellar disc 99% of the time, falling just shy of perfection. 9.5/10

Monsters, Inc.
studio: Buena Vista; country: Japan; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 20.4 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 31.76 Mbit/sec

2 Comments

 
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