Wall-E (Two-Disc and BD Live) [Blu-ray]

This was the first Blu-Ray disc I purchased, and it set a high bar for others to follow. The image quality is phenomenal, and it absolutely pays off in letting you notice the incredible details that Pixar put into this film. The additional content is also terrific. The Director's commentary includes thumbnails of the early artwork in the film's development. While the Director's commentary gives you the broad backstory and ideas behind the film, there's also a second commentary track, done Mystery Theater 3000 style, that points out all sorts of details and easter eggs in the movie that I'd missed. Wall-E is a fantastic film, and this Blu Ray edition helped me appreciate the movie even more.

Every time I see a Pixar film I tacitly assume that they have taken CGI about as far as it can go. Then with their next film they prove me wrong. (Unfortunately, with some of their upcoming films about to go 3D, I think they will -- as someone who wears glasses I have never been able to enjoy a 3D film -- the disposable spectacles are simply not made with glasses wearers in mind, and unless they come up with a solution for guys like me many of us will be unable to enjoy them.) I find it absolutely astonishing that WALL-E is getting so many one, two, three, and four-star ratings. Come on folks! What else would a film need to do to be worthy of five stars? I think the film critics are getting it right on this one. The film is consistently being named as one of the top two or three movies of 2008, regardless of genre. The debate is centered not on whether it is the top animated movie of 2008, but whether it will be nominated in the Best Picture or Best Animated Film category at the Oscars. If it is nominated for Best Picture, it would stand a very good chance of winning the Oscar.

The great thing about Pixar is that they keep stretching the limits of what is possible in CGI. Although trickle down doesn't work in economics, it does work in CGI. As Pixar developed programs with deeper and richer texturing and layering, new CGI programs are developed for special effects corporations doing work for TV series and movies. The reason we see such stunning special effects on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA is because of cutting edge work being done by Pixar and others. If you want to gauge just how far CGI has come, try looking at the CGI in BABYLON 5 Season One or SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND, both from the early nineties, and Season 3 of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. The heavily pixilated images of B5 have given way to the richly textured and infinitely more complex images of BSG. And it is only going to get better in the future.

As great as WALL-E is, the short film about a magician and his uncooperative bunny Alex is even better. PRESTO is one of the best comic shorts ever made, right up there with Chuck Jones's great Donald Duck epic "Duck Amuck" or his Bugs Bunny classic "What's Opera, Doc?" I haven't seen such comic invention in anything since the peak of the greatest Warner Brothers cartoons.

As to whether this is a movie for adults or kids, I have to add that in my limited experience with kids' opinions, they don't have much of a problem with it. It seems to be more adults thinking that kids won't like it than kids actually disliking it. I think the way to look at it is that the filmmakers made a movie that they would like to see. I think it is a stunning masterpiece. And a refreshing break from the pabulum that so many animated films are.

I missed out on Wall-E while it was in theaters this summer. However I still blind-bought the Blu-ray since people had nothing but great things to say about Pixar's latest film. I'm happy to say that this is definitely one of the best Blu-ray releases that I own.

The movie itself is a masterpiece. It's one of the best movies of 2008 for sure, and I'd put it as my 2nd favorite Pixar film behind Toy Story. In addition, you get a lot of great features across the 2-disc set. The shining star is The Pixar Story, which is a documentary covering the creation and success of the animation giant that is Pixar Studios. It's eighty-something minutes long and is practically a second movie that Disney stuffed inside this release. The Pixar Story is an awesome bonus that shouldn't be missed. There's also your standard making of documentaries and some animated shorts (Wall-E related or not) that are worth checking out.

Wall-E on Blu-ray gets a definite 5-star rating and is a must buy for anyone who owns a Blu-ray player.

Wall-E in blu-ray is outstanding in animation visuals and has a cute story line obviously with very little words used since they are robots. Adults who love animation will have fun watching this movie but it won't knock your socks off like Finding Nemo, Toy Story or Cars.
Little ones from say 5 to 10 years old will love this light hearted soft toned movie more then older kids and that is what I believe it is soft toned.
Some will find it boring and lacks depth in the characters. Frankly as good as this movie is they could have had more fun making Wall-E a little more interesting in his personalty he reminded me of Charlie Brown sorta bland but hey how much personality can you give a robot, lol.
And as for the complaint about the way to many fat people on the ship doing nothing not seeing the world around them, maybe it hit way to close to home for some, lol. Nothing wrong with reality story line in animation take a look around, that future for humans is closer then you think, lol.
All in all a good movie I would give 4 stars for animation but only 3 stars cause the plot dragged to much in the first quarter of the movie and I can't give it even close to 5 stars like I said in the first part it's a cute movie not a absolute must see movie.

In case you didn't have the good fortune of catching this movie when it was in theaters, it's the story of the last robot left on Earth after the humans fled the planet on a resort spaceship while the planet was being cleaned up by robots like Wall-E that compact trash and incinerate it since we we produced way too much trash for the planet to handle. I don't want to talk too much to the story, particularly because of spoilers (I hate spoiling things, even months after a movie is out), but it's really quite impressive. After watching it again I'm convinced that it's my favorite animated movie of all time. Part of what I love about it is that it doesn't have to compromise by having something for the kids and something for adults to enjoy like a lot of animated movies tend to do, it's just a wonderful experience for everyone. It really is unique, in my opinion, in this way. Even the physical humor really isn't childishly silly, it's clever. I kind of feel like it's a modern-day geek movie on par with Tron or Real Genius. Could it be the first one since The Matrix? I think it's the best robot movie ever. Suffice to say, the always stellar folks at Pixar really outdid themselves with this movie. It's fun, beautiful, heart-warming, fascinating, nerdy, and probably much more that I'm forgetting to say here. It's just really one of those rare A+ movies, which is confirmed when 5 months later I'm chomping at the bit to see it again and feel every bit as good about it as I did when I originally saw it.

Now let's get into the Blu-ray set here. The visuals are every bit as stunning on Blu-ray as they were in the movie theater. The problem with DVDs was that the quality was always inconsistent between movies. My Stranger Than Fiction disc looks almost like 1080i, but not my Batman Begins. Not so with Blu-ray, as far as I can tell. The bigger the screen you have at your disposal the more impressed you're likely to be. I was trying to finish up my laundry as I started the movie but I could not pull my eyes away from the movie because of how jaw-dropping the visuals were. And as if that wasn't enough, the audio is equally impressive. My TV only has simulated surround sound, but it felt pretty real to me. It's funny how a movie with so little dialogue can have such powerful audio through its score and robot noises and such. I can't even imagine how incredible this set will be for those with a true Dolby setup at home.

I should really step back for a second and remark at how impressed I am by the all around presentation from Disney. They really know how to brand themselves and their intellectual property. The first thing I encountered was BD Live stuff, and so I gladly went to the Disney site to setup my account and had no troubles at all. I'm 99% sure you could go right past all of this, but I just chose not to because I was excited about BD Live. There was only 4 features available, 2 of which I couldn't use. One was movie chat, where you and other friends with the movie can watch the move at the same time while text chatting. Yes, it will synchronize your movies, so I guess this would be good for cousins in different cities or when dad is on a business trip or something. They made the smart move of only allowing this between trusted friends, not just random strangers. Another one is movie mail, in which you can splice together scenes from the movie to make messages to send to trusted friends, and also add in video of yourself (no idea how, maybe through an EyeToy for PS3 owners?). I did use the movie challenge feature though, where you can join in live trivia challenges with strangers online in 10 minute rounds of 8-15 questions. I could choose from easy or medium, and I chose easy. They were fairly simple questions and what I loved was how it would just be at the bottom of the screen while you watch the movie. So you can pause the movie, open this up, and play while resuming playback. It's actually pretty fun and you get points depending on how fast you answer. The last feature is reward points, which is confusing to me but I think you earn them through the trivia and other stuff on the Disney site and you can redeem them for avatars and other bonus features and stuff, but I think that this is still in the process of being fleshed out more.

I liked the BD Live features because I felt like they were easy to get to and integrated well, but the other stuff was even better. First of all, there are 3 ways to watch the movie, or two in addition to just watching the normal movie. One is called Cin-experience, where you get insightful director's commentary in addition to picture-in-picture pop-ups of artwork and (silent) videos of animation from the pre-visualization and design stages of the film. I usually never listen to these commentary tracks, but in a movie with as little dialogue as Wall-E, I gave it a shot and loved it. The artwork really does add a surprising amount to the experience, and I learned a lot of cool random things about the movie, like that it took them over 3 years to put it together (it sounds like they started thinking about it in the late 90s). You could also turn off the artwork from the pop-up menu, which is a standard thing with Blu-ray discs. If you watch the movie normally, you can pop-up stuff from the main menu without having to pause the movie, like choosing a scene via screen shot rather than having to do the guesswork of skipping ahead or backwards on your remote. The other way to watch the movie is kind of like Science Mystery Theater where a group of four people who helped with the film and are generally kind of geeky point out random trivia and scientific inconsistencies and such, with a silhouetted couch occasionally popping up. It really was them on the couch, or else they put an undue amount of effort into animating their arms and hands as they talked. It was a really fun spin on a commentary track and I enjoyed the little of it that I tried out (I will watch the whole movie with it eventually). The only gripe I had with these was that you couldn't just turn them off in the middle of the movie. You could fairly easily stop the movie and go back to the main movie to choose the chapter and then resume playing in normal mode, but it should've been an easy on/off switch. Despite that odd pitfall, it really does help show why Blu-ray really is better than DVD.

There's more extras than that, and what's more exciting is that they're pretty much all in high-definition, even the promotional "sneak peeks"! While I appreciate the throwback to the video cassette Disney movies where they start out with "Coming soon to video" and all that (they had the same style and everything), I still don't think I like them starting out when you put in the disc the second time. I forgive it because there were a couple of really cool ones that looked gorgeous in HD, including one for the Disney documentary Earth. That's probably going to be in every big box electronics store as a demo once it's out on Blu-ray a year from now. It was simply the most incredible thing I've seen on my TV, including Wall-E. Anyway, there are real extras here, so let me stop teasing you with these psuedo-extras. The Axiom Arcade has 4 8-bit games that look like they would've been on your NES, and I thought that they were nifty, though maybe too advanced for kids not on the tail end of elementary school. There was also an interactive storybook for kids and "Trinkets and Treasures", which seems like it was animators playing with Wall-E and Eve to do random things, like Wall-E breaking a vacuum (which was one of the early teasers for the film). For the adults there's a documentary that's over an hour long, 3-D fly throughs of the virtual sets, Buy and Large shorts, a short Geek-o-rama featurette, profiles of all the robots in the film, and deleted scenes (spliced together frames to form a rough cut) with video commentary from the director before and after the scenes. There's also the Presto short from when the movie was in theaters and a short called Burn-E, which is a deleted scene that more or less evolved into a short (there's also an option to view it with story boards). I'm probably leaving something out, but you get the idea: there's a lot here. Not counting the 3 possible viewings of the film, there's well over 2 hours of high-definition content here. Disney probably has no intention of douple dipping with this film because this set is packed with stuff. If you enjoyed the film, I highly recommend picking it up.

I went into Blu-ray with plenty of skepticism, but I've been pretty impressed so far, especially with Wall-E. It's a great movie that has gotten star treatment on Blu-ray.