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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

BD impressions: Meet the Robinsons

5:13 PM / BD Impressions / No Comments

Supposedly, when John Lasseter took the helm of Walt Disney Animation Studios midway through Meet the Robinsons' development, he ordered the film to be drastically retooled, resulting in 60% of the completed footage being scrapped. If the finished product in any way constitutes an "improvement", I'm in no great rush to see what ended up on the cutting room floor. Disney's second in-house CGI feature, it's a step up from its predecessor, Chicken Little, in that it takes itself considerably more seriously and doesn't spend its duration undermining its own plot and characters. Still, it doesn't exactly measure up against the sort of material being pumped out by Pixar; even DreamWorks' features have more character than this. With few exceptions (i.e. the bowler hat-wearing villain, the best part of the film), the designs are bland and unappealing, with the filmmakers mistaking non-stop flailing for personality. At times, it feels as if the whole thing is one big long motion blur, with characters zipping around the screen, flapping their arms and generally behaving as if they have the consistency of gelatine (you wouldn't believe the trouble I had in getting screen captures in which the characters weren't just a blur). I'm not familiar with A Day with Wilbur Robinson, the William Joyce novel upon which it's based, so I have to say that a couple of twists midway through relating to the identities of certain characters generally took me by surprise and impressed me rather a lot in retrospect. Otherwise, though, I found Meet the Robinsons to be more or less as disappointing as any number of other latter-day Disney productions.

Image quality: On the other hand, the image quality of this release is anything but disappointing. Another early Disney BD title, this one does suffer in some very mild artefacting during bursts of frenetic movement or in other complex shots such as those featuring rainfall, but for the most part the picture is free from problems of any kind. Detail is spot on, allowing for the deliberately soft glow that affects many shots (look at Example 3 to see this effect in action), and the often headache-inducing colour palette is conveyed all too readily. I see no evidence whatsoever of edge enhancement or filtering. All in all, an excellent effort from Buena Vista. 9.5/10

Meet the Robinsons
studio: Buena Vista; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 22.7 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 34.43 Mbit/sec

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