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Tuesday, December 21, 2010

BD impressions: How to Train Your Dragon

4:40 PM / BD Impressions / 3 Comments

The Film: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON is the best DreamWorks animated feature I've seen to date... which would put it a notch or two below the worst of Pixar's output. In my opinion, whereas even Pixar's lesser movies have something reasonably substantial going on beneath the surface, most of DreamWorks' films feel like they started life as one-note jokes... for example BEE MOVIE, for which I'm still convinced a bunch of balding executives dreamt up the title at a board meeting, feel about slapping their thighs and laughing themselves silly, and then passed it off to their underlings to cobble together a film. I've made no secret of my disdain for most of the studio's output, but a couple of years back I was pleasantly surprised by KUNG FU PANDA, which was a pleasant enough way to pass an hour and a half, and this year, DRAGON has upped the stakes again with what is by far DreamWorks' most substantial animated effort to date.

A lot of the credit for this, I suspect, goes to Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, writers and directors of LILO AND STITCH (by far the best Disney film in the last fifteen years), who were brought on to the project fairly late in production, replacing the original writers and directors. A lot of the problems I tend to associate with DreamWorks are still present: the human character designs are ugly, the attempts at being "edgy" (a Katzenbergian mainstay) tend to fall flat, the voices are completely forgettable, and at its heart the story conforms to generic "boy wants to please father" animated feature template with all the expected clichés. So it's clearly no LILO AND STITCH. It's fun, though, moving along at a brisk clip and not getting bogged down in the nudge-nudge wink-wink pop culture references that so often mar CG animated features. The dragon toothless, the most obviously Sanders-like element of the film, is a decent Stitch stand-in, and the growing bond between him and Generic Teenage Boy Protagonist #34 is nicely realised.

This year, when compared against TOY STORY 3, HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON has no chance. In the UK the stakes are particularly high as DRAGON finds itself competing not just against Pixar's juggernaut for the crown of best animated feature of 2010, but also PONYO, THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, THE ILLUSIONIST and THE SECRET OF KELLS. I've yet to see THE ILLUSIONIST so I can't comment on it, but I'd rank DRAGON a little above KELLS and below PONYO and FROG. Still, I do get the impression that DreamWorks' output has been steadily improving in recent years, so who knows where whatever they release next year will end up on my "top films of 2010" list. 7/10

Image quality: A number of Paramount-released BDs - THE LOVELY BONES, TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, and indeed DreamWorks Animation's own KUNG FU PANDA and MONSTERS VS. ALIENS (at least in its 2D incarnation - the 3D version was fine) have suffered from light ringing around edges, particularly noticeable on the letterbox bars of 2.35:1 titles. At first, I assumed this was the result of filtering. Now, however, a number of people have put forward the idea that the issue actually stems from less than optimal downconversion from a higher resolution (4K?) source. Regardless of the reason, HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON appears to be affected too. The letterbox bars look fine, oddly enough, but there's some pretty noticeable ringing around high contrast edges throughout the film - particularly noticeable given the prevalence of shots of ships on the open seas and dragons soaring through the air. It's far from a bad-looking disc, but it does have a somewhat harsh appearance, placing it below the best-looking BDs of animated titles such as BOLT and PONYO. 8/10

And here's the real kicker: compare my capture of the Viking ships at sea to the same frame from the Blu-ray 3D version exclusive to Samsung's "3D Starter Kit", posted at Blu-ray.com. As you'll see, the slight ringing present in my capture from the 2D version (check the underside of the horizontal wooden bars of the left- and right-most ships) is absent in their capture from the 3D version, which looks much crisper and more defined overall. (Note that the 3D version is also slightly more zoomed out. I can't state with any authority whether the brightness differences are due to actual differences on the disc or different capture settings.) Looks like, regardless of whether or not you have a 3D-capable setup, the 3D disc is the preferred option - ditto for MONSTERS VS. ALIENS.

How to Train Your Dragon
studio: Paramount; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 24.6 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 36.1 Mbit/sec

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