I haven’t been to the cinema in a long time and probably won’t be going any time soon because of the high prices and the non-availability of original English versions around here, but that is not going to stop me from having a look at one of my favourite movie genres once in a while. I really love animated movies and I’m always interested in what’s going on in the business, but I wrote an Animation Update article once in Spring 2012 and never followed it up. Let’s see if I can make this into a semi-regular feature since I’m not really in the mood to write long reviews at the moment and there also won’t be much Oscar coverage from me this year – except for a little bit of genre-specific speculation at the end of this post.

Originally, Pixar was not really keen on turning their hit movies into franchises, with the notable exception of Toy Story. This attitude has changed a lot over the last years and now a whole load of sequel seem to be arriving. Monsters University is one of them and even a movie that was actually not expected at all, arriving twelve years after its predecessor. Going for a prequel instead a sequel might have been a good idea, but unfortunately the movie’s dazzling visuals and entertaining characters are not able to weigh against the lack of good storytelling. It’s still a watchable movie though, but the Pixar magic is just not there. So the first completely new review of 2014 is, for once, not a fully positive one – even the DVD release is not all it could have been despite a flawless technical presentation.

Continue to Review »

It’s February already and this means I really have to get DVDLog out of the Winter hiatus slowly. As an introduction to 2014 and a preparation to a coming review, I’m pulling out a DVD from 2002: Pixar’s fourth movie Monsters, Inc.! It’s one of their best early efforts and while not completely without faults, one of the movies almost completely foreign to the studio’s usual fare. I only saw it in 2002 when the DVD came out because I had missed it in the cinemas, but while I was never a big fan of Toy Story and A Bug’s Life I always liked Monsters, Inc. – probably because of the great voice cast and the wonderful animation, making up for a slightly weak script. The DVD release from 2002 also has some small faults, but is still amazing today with its enormeous amount of extras.

Continue to Review »

There was already a short trailer and some mentions on Twitter, but it seems I missed the official announcement: Brian Cox’ and Dara O Briain’s Stargazing Live is going into round  4 next week on January 7, 8 and 9 at 8pm UTC/GMT or 9pm CET on BBC2. The three one-hour broadcasts are as usual followed by an additional half-hour talk called Back to Earth – and of course the Stargazing HQ is again the Jodrell Bank Observatory. Considering the great success of the previous year’s broadcasts, this will be definitively worth watching.

Unfortunately the series has, typically for a BBC live production, never been released on DVD, but all episodes from 2011 and 2011 and the first one from 2013 are still up on Youtube at these links:

• Stargazing 2011 – Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3
• Stargazing 2012 – Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3
• Stargazing 2013 – Episode 1

Note: The website is still on semi-hiatus, so unfortunately no new reviews until the beginning of February.

Back in July I reviewed the first series of Shaun the Sheep, finally closing one of the gaps in my fondness for all things Aardman. Originally I wanted to review Series 2 earlier, but varying prices kept me from ordering it until now and because of a lack of other options I chose to make it the last review of the year. I know it’s not much and not even a particularly new disc, but the second series even ends with some Christmas-themed episodes, so it’s only fitting to have a look at the continuing adventures of Aardman’s plasticine sheep. The BBC DVD release of the second batch of fourty episode does not have a lot of extras, but image and sound are even better than before and for a price of about £10 for such a nice boxset I’m certainly not asking any questions.

Continue to Review »

With this little end-of-year update, DVDLog will be going into a winter hiatus until the end of January, when I’ll be back with more reviews and hopefully some other improvements. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, everyone – as usual, there are some more season’s greetings over on my other blog!

Rumours of this website’s demise, etc… I had great plans for DVDLog this December, but for a whole lot of different reasons none of these really worked out and I’m still sitting on a pile of un- and half-finished material. This happenend mainly because I lost my writing mojo a little again, but also because of the low influx of new DVDs at the moment. But this does definitively not mean I’m giving up here, quite the contrary – the plan is still to review a few new discs, translate more of my older articles into English and maybe write some other posts about movies and television.

I will try to do at least one little review before the holidays and maybe write another article – I hope I can get this done before the week is out. But I’m not sure if I will be doing the traditional DVD Recap this year, since there are only very few discs worth mentioning. Perhaps I’ll do it later in January after a winter break, which I will need to recharge my batteries, make some adjustments to the website like translating the menus and cleaning up the review list – I hope I can get back to a semi-regular update rhythm at the latest in February. 

But I’m not gone! I’m actually a little busy elsewhere – I’m posting daily images over on my Photography Blog and sometimes over on the original Bibra-Online.de website about everything from Space & Astronomy to Vintage Computers and Webdesign. And of course you can follow all my shenanigans on my Google+ stream – and on Facebook and Twitter, but I’m not as active as on G+ there.

The unusually dark and violent Rise of the Guardians made me wonder if Dreamworks Animation had lost its touch, but with their next movie, The Croods, the studio really made up for it. Despite being the Aardman movie that wasn’t and a production delay for about a year, the movie turned out amazingly well and embodies everything that the studio stands for: a solid story, great characters and wonderful animation. This is more than just a run-of-the-mill cave-family-movie, it’s an entirely fresh and original take on a simple idea. The DVD release is a bit of a disappointment, tough – the distributor switch from Paramount to Fox apparently means that Dreamworks has given up on the commentary track, but at least the movie looks as good as possible and there are even some deleted scenes as extras.

Continue to Review »

He was one of the truly great ones of Germany’s political cabaret – last night, Dieter Hildebrandt sadly died at the age of 86. Only yesterday there were reports that he was gravely ill, before he seemed almost indestructible and had been on stage until quite recently. Although his presence was limited to German-speaking audiences, I’m writing this article in English to give everyone an impression how great his influence had been. So far there has been only one English-language obituary about him, but he also deserves to be recognized outside of Germany.

When I finally bought Dreamworks’ latest two animated movies, Rise of the Guardians and The Croods on DVD, I assumed that both would follow the long tradition of the studio of having an Audio Commentary with the filmmakers as one of the extras, but only the first movie had one. It seems that the distributor switch from Paramount to 20th Century Fox had one unfortunate casualty – the commentary track, an extra which had been around even longer than the DVD itself, going back almost to the 1980s with the emergence of the laserdisc and the capability of storing more than one soundtrack on an audiovisual medium. In today’s article in lieu of a dvd review, I’m looking at the probable fate of the audio commentary and introduce some of my favourite commentary tracks.

Dreamworks has had a lot of success with their animated movies and so far I loved almost all of their movies with some exceptions. I had high hopes for Rise of the Guardians, but it turned out that their collaboration with children’s books author William Joyce is one of their rare failures. While the movie has an amazing concept, great characters and voices and dazzling visuals, the story is disappointingly weak and a surprising amount of violence makes this feel not like a Dreamworks movie at all. In today’s somewhat longer-than-usual review, I tried to get to the bottom of what went wrong with Rise of the Guardians. This final joint DVD release from Dreamworks and Paramount is, however, absolutely fine and while some extras from the Blu-Ray are missing, the most interesting material has been ported over.

Continue to Review »