Looney Tunes Platinum Collection: Volume 1 (Warner) promises “50 of the greatest shorts the studio has ever made” and I while I may quibble over specific choices, I can’t fault the overall curation of the collection, which leans toward the diversity of artists, characters and styles through the golden age of the Warner animation unit.

Disc One features the best of the defining characters: Bug Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, plus Sylvester and Tweety, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Pepe le Pew and Speedy Gonzales. Among the 25 cartoons collected here are Chuck Jones’ two brilliant opera spoofs “Rabbit of Seville” and “What’s Opera, Doc,” Daffy in “The Scarlet Pumpernickel” and “Robin Hood Daffy,” the Oscar-winning “Tweetie Pie” (the debut of Tweety Bird), two definitive Road Runner classics and one of the greatest cartoons every made: “Duck Amuck,” where Daffy goes to war against a prankster animator.

Disc Two is a treasure trove of the studio’s greatest one-shots and minor creations. Along with such one-offs as “One Froggy Evening” (the wordless masterpiece with the all-singing, all dancing frog) “The Three Little Bops” (a jazzbo rendition of The Three Little Pigs with Stan Freberg doing voice duty) and “The Dover Boys at Pimento University” (Chuck Jones’ wonderfully surreal parody of 19th century dime novels with Tom, Dick and Larry and not-so-helpless damsel Dora) are the complete golden age appearance of Marvin the Martian (five cartoons, including “Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century”), the Tasmanian Devil (five cartoons), Witch Hazel (four), kitten-loving canine Marc Antony (three) and Ralph Richards, the boy daydreamer whose flights of fantasy take him through the most delightful of boy’s own adventures (two cartoons, both directed by Chuck Jones).

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The Combo Pack

Gnomeo and Juliet (Disney)

The Shakespeare romantic drama gets played out by rival families (gangs? herds? colonies?) of garden gnomes from neighboring English garden yards, a feud that’s been going on for… well, as long as any of these lawn ornaments can remember. These guys are color coded for easy identification—red hats and blue hats, matching the garish design themes of their dotty old homeowners (the Montagues and Capulets, naturally)—and their shenanigans play out to a score of classic Elton John songs (and two new ones) and a script crammed full of pop-culture references and Shakespeare puns (their address: 2B and Not 2B Verona Drive, Stratford-Upon-Avon)​.

Directed by Kelly Asbury (Shrek 2) and produced by Elton John through his company, Rocket Productions (which gets him his own gnome figure), Gnomeo and Juliet riffs off the Toy Story conceit that these inanimate objects get very animated indeed when people aren’t looking, and of course two rivals fall in love as the rivalry escalates into acts of ceramic destruction.

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Bluy-ray+DVD Combo

The Illusionist (Sony)

Sylvain Chomet (of the delirious The Triplets of Belleville) transforms an unproduced script by French auteur Jacques Tati (Mon Oncle) into a tender tale of a French magician and a Scottish girl in the theater-folk society of London as the old world of stage performance gives way to the new theater of rock and roll. They don’t even speak the same language, not that words are the currency of communication in this film, a delicate and delightful piece of old-fashioned hand-drawn animation where character is in body language and personality in the “performance.”

Chomet doesn’t just adapt Tati’s script, he models his lanky magician Tatischeff on Tati’s own distinctive screen character and performance style. And while he has his own approach to staging screen comedy, Chomet shares Tati’s preference to playing scenes out in full shots and long takes where his characters can fill the world with their presence. His screen Tati evokes the original beautifully while creating a unique animated character in its right. As the title suggests, the magic here is all illusion, a matter of sleight of hand and stagecraft, but Chomet reminds us that theater and art creates its own brand of magic. Chomet’s brand of animated magic earned the film an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature.

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Four discs is Pixar genius

The Incredibles (Disney)

The digital debut of modern animation great Brad Bird (The Iron Giant) makes its Blu-ray debut.

Working with the computer animation pros at Pixar for the first (but not the last) time, Bird drops cartoonishly exaggerated super-heroics into the typical (by all outside appearances) suburban nuclear family, creating a super-powered dynamo of dysfunction and frustration in hiding (they’re in witness protection from years of personal injury lawsuits against the crime-fighting hero types). Dad, aka Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson), is a walking house stuck behind an insurance adjuster’s desk who secretly sets up his neighborhood watch for a taste of the old thrill and Mom, aka Elasti-Girl (Holly Hunter), stays at home to raise a shy teenage girl prone to turning invisible and a rambunctious speed demon son with a penchant for pranks, until a secret organization recruits Mr. Incredible for a return to duty.

Bird gets in plenty of digs about cultural coddling and conformity while creating a familiar family dynamic and then transforms it into a spandex suit version of a seventies James Bond thriller. True to form, Bird doesn’t coddle the audience when it comes to the danger faced by the family when megalomaniac supervillain Syndrome (a young punk who looks like the Heatmiser and is voiced by Jason Lee as a cruel, cocky brat) targets the Incredibles: “They will kill you if they get the chance,” Elasti-Girl cautions her kids in utterly grave tones. “Do not give them that chance.” The brassy score by Michael Giaccino is a perfect Bond-ian pastiche.

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Tangled up in a Combo Pack

“Tangled” (Disney)

After stumbling through their own in-house CGI animated features, Disney (with a little guidance from Pixar’s creative leader and new Disney animation czar John Lasseter) finally finds the right balance of classic animation magic and contemporary sensibility with this comic musical adventure version of the “Rapunzel” fairy tale. And it does so without superstar casting or a surfeit of pop-culture references. This one features a plucky little girl with an epic mane of magic hair that glows when she sings (Mandy Moore), a dashing rogue of an outlaw who ends up a partner on her quest (Zachary Levi), a stepmom who walks all over her self-esteem (Donna Murphy), a chameleon with a wry sense of humor, a horse that thinks he’s a dog and a rogues gallery of hard-bitten thugs with a dream in their hearts.

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“Tales From Earthsea” DVD (Disney)
“Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind” Blu-ray+DVD Combo (Disney)

Like father, like son?

Hayao Miyazaki is a household name in Japan, thanks to such films as “Princess Mononoke,” “Spirited Away” and “Ponyo.” Stateside, however, he’s too often been described as Japan’s Walt Disney, a comparison that captures the director’s dedication to animated films of wonder and imagination (which extends to all the films from his Studio Ghibli), but misses his distinctive sensibility. Miyazaki is an original with an epic vision, an animist mythology, an environmentally-cons​cious subtext and a dedication to the art of hand-drawn animation that he maintains even in the face of the digital revolution. Disney, fittingly enough, releases two features from his Studio Ghibli this week.

“Tales From Earthsea,” based on the “Earthsea” novels by Ursula Le Guin and a concept developed by Hayao Miyazaki, marks the directorial debut of his son, Goro Miyazaki. Miyazaki Pere’s influence is very apparent in the themes of nature in balance and the greed of mankind tipping the scales, and the character designs and types are also familiar, with dragons out of Asian culture dropped into a medieval European world of castles and towers. Yet he lacks his father’s storytelling richness and narrative sweep, and for all the gorgeous detail of the animation he fails to create much tension or energy. Fans of Ursula Le Guin will have their own problems with the way the film boils down her mythology to a generic fantasy odyssey tale. But there is a visual grace unique to the Studio Ghibli brand, and the dark powers manifest themselves in a weirdness that bends the natural world in unnatural ways.

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Blu Bambi

“Bambi: Diamond Edition” (Disney)

Graceful and gorgeous, gentle and fierce, delicate and majestic, Walt Disney’s “Bambi” is often cited as the greatest animated film ever made and the crown jewel from the golden years of Disney animation. Agree or not, the fifth full-length animated feature from Disney is a magnificent piece of animated storytelling and a cinematic landmark that has lost none of its wonder or power over the years. Adapted from the novel by Felix Salter and directed by David Hand (under the close supervision of Walt Disney), the story follows the life of a small fawn over the course of four seasons as he develops from childhood innocence (with a menagerie of delightful animal friends) through adult responsibility. Like the best of Disney, the animal characters burst with personality with every perfectly animated every movement and the colors are painted with a delicacy unseen in contemporary animated feature filmmaking. AV Club critic Noel Murray wrote in 2005 that the film “isn’t so much animated as illustrated like a vintage children’s book, with elegant painted backgrounds occupied by simplified faces.” The multi-plane photography is amazing, giving the painted cels a sense of depth and the camerawork a graceful fluidity. And it is the rare children’s movie that broaches the subject of death in a meaningful and profound way.

Film Archivist and Home Theater Forum guru Robert Harris likes the new Blu-ray, but as you can read in the comments thread of this forum, Disney’s decision to rejigger the colors for a brighter, more modern palette is still the subject of much debate and criticism. As Harris writes, “The re-imagining of the Disney classics has taken its toll, frustrated many who love the originals, and will continue to stir controversy.” But home theater critics across the board have given this their seal of approval, including Gary Tooze at DVD Beaver. And, to add my voice to the choir, me. This is a gorgeous and lush Blu-ray presentation.

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“Alice in Wonderland: 60th Anniversary” (Blu-ray+DVD Combo) (Disney)

Alice down the rabbit hole of HD

Disney’s 1951 animated adaptation of both of Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels (“The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass”) streamlines the story for a trippy bounce down the rabbit hole. A flop upon release, it was rediscovered by the drug generation in the sixties and finally embraced as a Disney classic-lite by subsequent generations. You could see it as a juvenile acid trip: innocent little Alice imbibes strange food and drink which makes her grow and shrink, talks with a cat that has a tendency to dissolve in front of her eyes and takes advice from a caterpillar puffing on a water pipe. But let’s not get too far down that path.

Like most of Disney’s animated features, it gets rolled out every seven years or so in a new edition. This year it bows on Blu-ray in a brilliant new master. For this look, I turn to the experts for guidance.

“Quite a massive jump in color saturation and vibrancy in the new 1080P transfer of Disney’s 51′ classic Alice in Wonderland,” writes Gary Tooze at DVD Beaver, a site that specializes in measuring and surveying the technical quality of the discs under scrutiny. “Reds, blues and yellows are notable improvements, there are no unseemly jaggies – as well as a dramatic improvement – it looks flawless – almost as if it were brand new.” A gallery of screen shots from the new Blu-ray edition and the previous DVD releases contrasts the visual quality and the palette, with the Blu-ray indeed brighter, sharper and more cleanly saturated.

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Life and romance plays out like a series of videogame challenges by way of a comic book fantasy in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Universal), which I review at MSN. It’s based on a series of graphic novels and director Edgar Wright, whose love of popular culture bounces through his films and TV projects with creative abandon, celebrates the graphic qualities of the comic book origins in a playfully cinematic manner. Also new is Neil Marshall’s Romans-versus-Barbarians warrior epic Centurion (Magnolia), a survival thriller of a lost Roman legion in 2^nd Century Britain that I reviewed as part of my SIFF coverage here, and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (Criterion), which I review on my blog here.

The rich Technicolor of The Archers' Naval drama

The Battle Of The River Plate (aka The Pursuit of the Graf Spee) (Hen’s Tooth) – The penultimate collaboration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the filmmaking team known as The Archers, is a World War II military drama with an unusual approach. The British campaign to stop German pocket battleship Graf Spee, a fast, well-armed ship wreaking havoc on British transports in the South Atlantic, was the first major British victory of the war. The Archers frame the conflict as a battle of wits between two brilliant naval minds (Peter Finch commanding the Graf Spee, Anthony Quayle conducting the British ships).

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Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time (Disney) and Letters to Juliet (Summit) are both covered by fellow MSN critics, while I review Princess Kaiulani (Lionsgate) at MSN and Starcrash, the 1978 Italian Star Wars knock-off, on my blog here. That covers the big ticket releases and the cult item of the week. As for the rest…

Sit down, my son, my son

My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done (First Look / Absurda) – “David Lynch Presents a Werner Herzog Film,” reads the credits of this weirdly deadpan drama, based on the real-life matricide perpetrated by an unstable actor who reenacts a Greek tragedy in his own life and played out as a surreal police procedural. It’s hard to tell if Herzog adopted some of Lynch’s sensibility along with some of his acting company, or if the juxtaposition merely makes their compatibility more apparent, and honestly, I’m not sure I get the film, but it burrowed into me nonetheless.

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Hayao Miyazaki is one of Japan’s living treasures, a beloved filmmaker whose animated films number among the most beautiful and most enchanting productions ever drawn by hand. In this day of CGI productions, the aging artists still personally draws his key frames and defining characters, with a love and craft that comes through every frame. They may seem old fashioned and perhaps too sweet for American audiences—his films, while loved by many, have never found the huge audiences that flock to the more knowing and culturally savvy Pixar films and Shrek sequels—but the lovely fables, epic adventures, ecologically-minded dramas and modern fairy tales are all treasures.

Ponyo: Below the waves

His most recent film, Ponyo (Disney), is released this week by Disney, which—despite the great voice line-up of their English language adaptations—treats his films more like exotic imports than mainstream movies. Part Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, part ecological fable and part children’s fantasy come to life, this gentle storybook film is a simple, sweet tale animated with a delicacy unique to animated features. Ponyo is a water sprite, a curious undersea creature and daughter of the sea gods who gets swept to the shore, trapped in the pollution of the human world and rescued by a human boy, with whom she falls in love. This isn’t the romantic type of love of Disney’s The Little Mermaid but the unconditional affection of young kids and she takes human form to join him on land, which upsets the balance of nature so carefully kept in check by her wizard father (voice of Liam Neeson) and elemental mother (Cate Blanchett).

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The release week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day is traditionally an off week for DVD, usually with just a couple of minor releases. Not so this year. TV releases this week include Glee: Season 1: Road To Sectionals (Fox) and United States Of Tara: The First Season (Paramount) (see TV on DVD here), and there are some substantial film releases debuting this week.

David Twohy’s A Perfect Getaway (Universal) is a deft piece of genre filmmaking, which is no backhanded compliment. In a film culture where B-movie plots are routinely executed with budgets in excess of $100 million in place of intelligence and thrown into thousands of theaters, the well-tuned genre piece is an increasingly rare breed. A Perfect Getaway is a type of film we’re used to seeing in myriad variations: an urban couple leaves the comfort of civilization for a vacation isolated in the wilds, where there just so happens to be a killer on the loose and no end to suspicious characters.

A Perfect Getaway: Trouble in paradise

Twohy delivers everything we expect—attractive performers in paradise (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich as cute urbanites fumbling through the jungle, Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez as rather more prepared trail companions), breathtaking landscapes and lush scenery, ominous tensions and plenty of action—and something you likely did not: suspense, surprise and sheer fun. In a film culture where genre storytelling all too often boils down to the stock gimmicks used over and over again with special effects or high concept twists to hide the familiarity, this is so refreshingly old school smart that it feels almost new. For more on the film, read my feature review here. The DVD features both the theatrical cut and a “Director’s Cut,” which runs about ten minutes longer, but no other supplements. The Blu-ray features an alternate ending, which isn’t all that different but is significantly shorter. I prefer the original.

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