Monday, November 2, 2009

BD impressions: Wallace & Gromit: The Complete Collection

12:02 PM / BD Impressions / 15 Comments

On his Radio 5 film review show on Friday, Mark Kermode argued that Wes Anderson's recent stop motion animation adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox (he slated it - deservedly, judging by the trailer) simply served to show up how good Nick Park and Aardman Animation are at what they do. I agree completely: they're beautifully crafted and have a universal appeal, and The Wrong Trousers is still one of the few films I can think of that is absolutely perfect from its first frame to its last. And, even if A Grand Day Out and the most recent outing, A Matter of Loaf and Death, seem more slight than the more ambitious The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, they're still among the most enjoyable short films ever created. Watching them all back to back is a fascinating experience, as it allows you to see the people behind them growing as artists and craftsmen (with Park working more or less on his own for the first film, assisted on subsequent outings by a growing army of animators, model makers and the like). Curiously, though, it also hammers home how timeless they are: each one is every bit as good today as it was when it was first released. A superb quartet of films and one that I hope will become a quintet before too long.

Image quality: For the first three films, the transfers exceeded even my wildest dreams. I'm genuinely floored by how good they look, particularly A Grand Day Out, a student film whose look on BD surpasses that of many multi-million dollar Hollywood blockbusters. What we end up with is an image that looks to be free of any sort of invasive digital tampering, with the material - warts and all - being left to speak for itself. Grain varies in density but is present throughout and looks completely natural, and the greatly increased definition allows all sorts of nuances to be picked out that were previously hidden, from the pictures on the walls of Wallace and Gromit's living room and their rocket to the thumb-prints in the plasticine.

Surprisingly, The Wrong Trousers is both the softest and least grainy of the trio, although I wouldn't necessarily assume that to be indicative of any wrongdoing. What does let the transfer of this film down slightly is the noticeably elevated blacks. These affect all three films to a degree and are what prevent the first and third instalments from receiving a perfect 10/10, but the problem seems to be more pronounced in The Wrong Trousers, particularly noticeable during the various fades to black, which have now become fades to dark grey.

With A Close Shave, the grain becomes more pronounced again, although not to the same degree as the first film. Once again, the image is extremely pleasing, although it's worth pointing out that, unlike the original TV broadcast, VHS and DVD releases, this version has been framed in a ratio of 1.66:1, which is now it was presented for its limited number of theatrical screenings. It has been cropped vertically, which is noticeable in a handful of shots. See, for instance, Example 8, where the composition is compromised by the tighter vertical framing. (Compare with the same frame in a 1.33:1 version.) The 1.66:1 framing is presumably considered to constitute a legitimate version of the film, and for the most part it looks fine, although I would have preferred if the 1.33:1 version had been included for the sake of completion. (The differences in colour timing are also worth noting, although in my opinion the less garish colours of the BD are easier on the eyes.)

Finally, we come to the most recent film, A Matter of Loaf and Death, and here is where things go completely belly-up. I'm not sure whether to blame Lions Gate or the BBC, who presumably provided the master, but someone really dropped the ball here. The entire image is afflicted by pronounced aliasing, which plays havoc with diagonal lines and makes the whole thing look low resolution... which it may in fact be, as the appearance of the image reminds me a great deal of that of poorly deinterlaced footage. (Of course, as the entire film was shot progressively, there would have been no need to deinterlace it in the first place, but...) See Example 6 for a particularly noxious instance of this artefact, and for good measure compare it with the same frame on the excellent UK disc. To add insult to injury, the audio track on this film is afflicted by noticeable distortion which makes it sound as if the whole thing was recorded in a bathtub. The effect is similar to what you get when you alter the speed of an audio file in cheap sound editing software while maintaining the same pitch, and given that the film was shot at 25 fps (the UK television standard) and then slowed down to 23.976 fps for this BD release (to make it compatible with US players and displays), I could well believe that this is what happened.

In the final analysis, image quality ratings for the four films are as follows:

A Grand Day Out: 9.5/10
The Wrong Trousers: 9/10
A Close Shave: 9.5/10
A Matter of Loaf and Death: 5/10

A Grand Day Out
studio: Lions Gate; country: USA; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 5.56 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 33.26 Mbit/sec

 
The Wrong Trousers
studio: Lions Gate; country: USA; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 7.04 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 33.27 Mbit/sec

 
A Close Shave
studio: Lions Gate; country: USA; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 7.3 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 33.28 Mbit/sec

 
A Matter of Loaf and Death
studio: Lions Gate; country: USA; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 7.02 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 33.29 Mbit/sec

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