Universal's Blu-ray of Coraline (available tomorrow) features one of the best home video transfers of the year, hands-down. The movie is undoubtedly in the running for one of the Best Animated Feature slots among a potentially tough field (UP, Ponyo, A Christmas Carrey, 9, The Princess and the Frog). If Universal wants Coraline to be a player in that race, they should get copies of this Blu-ray to Academy voters now to lay some groundwork. As I understand it, the rules for the category allow for up to five nominees, but they've only done three since its inception.
Click image to enlarge (high resolution .PNG taken from DVD)
The Behind the Scenes featurettes are what will etch this movie into Academy voter memory for the end of the year. Both the 35-minute piece and the snippets interspersed throughout the movie using the U-Control Picture-in-Picture (PiP) feature sell the amount of elbow grease that it took to make this. Most of the runtime of the featurette is devoted to all the painstaking work and design that went into making the whole movie happen, from tiny buttons and zippers to the armies of stop-motion puppets. The PiP bits focus on individual set pieces and puppets as they appear during the film. There's a separate featurette and set of PiP bits covering the voice actors' work, which are all well and good, but the real meat is in the BTS material.
Click image to enlarge (high resolution .PNG taken from DVD)
Coraline had the best theatrical 3D of any animated feature I've seen this year. Monsters vs. Aliens' 3D is negated by the vacuous movie contained in it, and UP's 3D only added some extra depth, but it wasn't designed from the beginning with 3D in mind. The Coraline Blu came with 3D glasses I approached with trepidation. Previous home video attempts at 3D have failed miserably.
Click image to enlarge (high resolution .PNG taken from DVD)
The anaglyph 3D glasses gave me a headache, but I'm assuming I needed to be sitting further back from the TV. Colleagues who've watched the whole thing all the way through report no pain or discomfort. What I did see through Coraline's pink/green glasses for fifteen minutes or so was much better than the red/blue 3D on releases like The Polar Express before it. The dimensionality was impressively similar to the polarized 3D I saw in theaters, but it's still far from perfect. If Universal can squeeze Coraline in for a second 3D run in October, I think they could make some decent scratch on it, simply because you can't yet replicate it at home.
The Blu-ray also includes some Deleted Scenes and a Director's Commentary with Henry Selick. Composer Bruno Coulais joins the commentary 1 hour 35 minutes in for about five minutes total. The movie is worth owning, but note that the Picture-in-Picture stuff is only on the Blu-ray, not the DVD.