Extras: Crew biographies, 64-page book "Insideaard"
Director:
Varies
Cast:
Frank, Carol, Dog, Parrots, Pandas, Adam, the voice of Nina Simone and more
Over the past twenty of so years,
Aardman Animations have come to the fore, even though they've been around for
a lot longer. They've made scores of short animated films all of which have
won great acclaim from the exceptional Creature Comforts Heat Electric adverts,
featuring various wildlife and domestic animals talking about their heating
facilities and using the actual voices of real people, to using the singing
voice of Nina Simone in a claymation promo for "My Baby Just Cares
For Me", which saw the single go into the charts and make No.5 in October
1987.
Aardman's most famous creations, which aren't included here, have been
Morph, Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run, the recent
feature-length film starring the voice of Mel Gibson.
The following is a complete run down of the content which runs for over
two-and-a-half hours and is the otherwise complete collection of the award
winning short films from the company.
Creature Comforts
Heat Electric: Frank and Carol and Dog
Pib and Pog
Heat Electric: Parrots and Pandas
Minotaur and Little Nerkin
Heat Electric: Pandas 2 and Penguins
War Story
Heat Electric: Penguins 2 and Frank 2
Wat's Pig
Heat Electric: Pigs and Orangutans
My Baby Just Cares For Me
Heat Electric: Penguins 3 and Pablo
Stage Fright
Humdrum
Pop
Owzat
Adam
Ident
Al Dente
Loves Me, Loves Me Not
Babylon
Next
On Probation
Sales Pitch
Palmy Days
Early Bird
Late Edition
Confessions of a Foyer Girl
Down and Out
Going Equipped
Not Without my Handbag
With so many short films, the quality is better for more recent short films
although some of the Heat Electric ones do suffer slightly. There are no
noticeable encoding problems so it's free of artifacts and the picture
ratio varies, but those scenes which are in widescreen they are not anamorphic.
The average bitrate is 5.93b/s, often peaking over 8Mb/s.
The sound is a combination of mono and stereo, which will lead to some surround
effects from time to time. Again, for some of the older footage, including
those Heat Electric ads, the sound is very muffled at the start of each one
so turn those up a bit.
Extras :
Crew biographies is the first extra giving an insight
into those who work for Aardman including Nick Park, Peter Sproxton and David
Lord. There's also an excellent free 64-page book, "Insideaard",
containing pictures, comments and more from Aardman Animations.
There may not be other extras, but since the disc contains all their
individual short films then that will do for me.
It's well-chaptered with 37 split over the 31 films listed above, since
the Heat Electric ads are split into more than one chapter.
All the dialogue is in English and there are sadly no subtitles. The main
menu has animation and sound in the form of film clips.
The overall marking becomes three because the picture, sound and extras aren't
high scoring, but don't worry about that. Go by the content score and then
go buy the disc.
As of April 2009, Blu-rays and DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TH-37PX80B
37" Plasma TV with a Sony BDP-1500 Blu-ray player and played through a Yamaha DSP-AX820 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Jan 2011: Intel Quad Core Dell XPS 8100, i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80Ghz, 8Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce GTS 240, Windows 7
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
