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Wild (The)
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Buena Vista Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Cameron Murray (26th November 2006). |
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The Film
 After a harrowing "24" (2001-Present) marathon I felt that watching and then reviewing a nice Disney film would be a nice change of pace, I was half correct and half sadly mistaken. "The Wild" is Disney's answer to "Madagascar" (2005), with zoo animals escaping from a zoo in order to rescue Samson's son Ryan (Kiefer Sutherland and Greg Cipes respectively). The cast of this little Ditty is impressive with actors that you would recognize and will kick yourself for not picking up on their voices. While the story is largely predictable and not incredibly emotionally engaging for kids I would suspect that it will still be a treat. The story starts off in the New York Zoo, where Samson is the king of his domain and his son Ryan lives in the shadow of his roar, as Ryan (one can only assume) hasn't reached puberty. After an incident that Ryan starts (nothing quite like stampeding to put a dampner on a zoo-wide curling event), Samson has a few terse words to say to Ryan which spurs Ryan to make a break for the wild. Almost as soon as he makes this decision he regrets it, and cries out for his dad to save him, unfortunately Samson is unable to stop the truck that Ryan is hiding in and is forced to watch as his son is taken away from him (It was at this point I started having flashbacks to "24" Season One). Samson has no choice but to try and rescue his son with his unlikely band of cohorts including a Bridget the giraffe (Janeane Garofalo), Benny the squirrel (James Belushi), Larry the snake (Richard Kind) and an English Koala, Nigel (Eddie Izzard). Now along the way they meet a plethora of other animals, including Canadian Geese and Crocodiles/ Alligators, until they reach the wild and meet a group of Wildebeests who wish to make a leapfrog maneuver and reach the top of the food chain becoming carnivores, and they believe that this can only be achieve this by consuming Lions thereby usurping them as the kings of the Jungle. The story feels quite loosely thrown together and little to no respect shown for the reality of predator-prey type relationships, but I guess that is what suspension of disbelief is for. The cast makes the suspension of disbelief easier to swallow with their performances. Kiefer Sutherland hardly had to stretch himself to fulfill this role and I get the sneaking suspicion that he may actually have needed to tone down his dramatics to not scare the little children. Belushi is fun as the squirrel side kick who, at times, has to do a verbal bitch slap on Samson as he knows the big Lion better than anyone including the secret that he is keeping from everyone. Izzard is perhaps the stand out performance for me in this movie with his very dry English delivery of his lines and the fact that he plays an English koala which I assume they decided that he was shipped from an English zoo and not that they didn't realize that koalas come from Australia. The movie is made by Disney, stylistically what can you expect. It's good they've done it a thousand times before so it's unlikely that you're going to see anything new. The CGI animation was impressive particularly when it came to capturing the animals motion, not so much there main actions which at times were quite cartoony, but more when they were walking into a scene or off into the background it had a startling realism to it. The performances in this movie were fun, but unfortunately it seems that Disney is just going through the motions when it comes to the story and seems to have lost their edge when it comes to trying anything new. I know the Disney style has worked for years, but sometimes you want to see something a bit new. In short if you want a movie that you can plonk the kids down in front of and walk away then this is probably a good one it won't necessarily have you laughing along with it like a "Shrek" (2001) or "Monsters Inc." (2001) but it should keep the kids out of your hair for 80 minutes or so.
Video
Presented in a ratio of 1.78:1 this high-definition transfer is presented in 1080p / 24fps using AVC MPEG-4 compression. The result is simply phenomenal, being a CGI film this transfer was generated directly from the original digital source. The image is sharp and presents colors vividly and accurately, displaying a lushness and sharpness that was missing from the standard DVD release. The image displays detail extremely well, you can see fine textures on the animated animals including fur and other finer elements. I was impresses with overall black levels and shadow detail. This is a perfect representation of what a high-definition transfer should be like. Buena Vista has given this film a spectacular treatment on this new next generation format.
Audio
Four tracks are included on this Blu-Ray disc, an English PCM 5.1 track encoded at 48kHz/24-Bit as well as English, French and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 surround tracks. For the purposes of this review I chose to view the film with its PCM 5.1 track and compared to its Dolby Digital 5.1 track (which was released with the standard definition edition and and also makes an appearance on this disc) there isn't that much difference other than a slightly increased volume in which the tracks were mixed and perhaps a fraction more depth to the overall PCM track. I found dialogue clean and distortion free which is a give, environmental surrounds are active when they need to be and subtle at other times, action scenes are especially a treat to watch considering the activity in the speakers is well balanced and feels natural providing the viewer with an immersive quality that although is good, could have been much better considering this is after all a high-definition release. Optional subtitles are included in English for the hearing impaired, French and Spanish.
Extras
Buena Vista Home Entertainment has included all of the extras found on the film's DVD counterpart which includes two short featurettes, a collection of deleted scenes, a music video. Below is a closer look at these supplements. These extras are included in high-definition 1080p. 5 deleted scenes are first up and can be viewed with optional audio commentary by the film's director Steve "Spaz" Williams and producer Clint Goldman. These scene have a "Play All" option or can be viewed individually. The scenes are a combination of rough animation and storyboard elements and in their commentary they discuss the reason why the scenes were dropped and also provides some brief background on the scenes. The 5 scenes included are: - "Benny's Weird Dream" which runs for 43 seconds, Benny dreams about his love for Bridget. - "Back at the Zoo" runs for 1 minute, Benny complains about being left behind. - "Bridget and Larry Doomed" runs for 36 seconds, surrounded by Wildebeests they share an awkward joke. - "Back on the Boat" runs for 1 minute 15 seconds, the animals argue about leaving Samson behind or if they should go back for him. - "Thumbman" runs for 1 minute 12 seconds, Nigel freaks out on the boat. Next up is Music & More: "Real Wild Child" a music video by the band Everlife, which runs for 3 minutes 28 seconds, this is a rock song that is featured on the film's soundtrack. The video is a generic rock clip with the girl rockers edited with some clips from the finished film. Backstage Disney is the following section that includes 2 featurettes: - "Eddie Izzard Unleashed" which runs for 3 minutes 28 seconds. Here we see some footage of Eddie recording his lines during the sessions. Most of his stuff was improvised and we can see his comic genius evident in this clip. - "Meet Colin: The Rock Hyrax" runs for 2 minutes 17 seconds, this funny clip sees a Disney staffer taking his role as one of the animals a little too seriously. Also included is a feature entitled "Movie Showcase" which basically jumps to three key scenes from the movie that show off the disc's high-definition quality.
Overall
As far as image and sound go this is a high quality disc, the image is reference quality that will impress even the most anal of cinephiles, as far as extras go I was disappointed with the lack of substantial extras on this disc, which were ported over from the standard definition release, a decent making-of documentary and even an audio commentary would have gone a long way.
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