When friends new to Blu-ray ask what's best to start with, I tell them "animation" every time. 2009 was a great year, with plenty of new, catalog, and classic titles dropped on the format. I've decided to split these into Traditional Animation and CG Animation categories, since not all CG animated movies are 3D, nor are all traditional-style animated flicks "2D".
Traditional Animation
Best of the Best
Coraline
From my review lo so many months ago:
"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."
Best of the Best
Pinocchio
No one expected Pinocchio to look this good until they cracked open their Blu-rays earlier this year. My earliest memories of it are a black clamshell-clad VHS tape that I considered among the scariest movies I'd ever seen when I was in elementary school. The colors have never been this vivid or bright, nor has the fine detail ever been this clean.
Best of the Best
Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs
Another tremendous cleanup job by Lowry Digital, this makes me wonder how good Cinderella is going to look.
The Highly-Regarded But Unseen:
Akira, Fire & Ice, A Charlie Brown Christmas
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
I've heard no end of good things about Akira, but I can't pretend to have seen this new master of it. WB never sent review material on Charlie Brown or Grinch, and it simply wasn't in the budget to buy them. I'm told by friends that the transfer is so crisp on Fire & Ice you can see the specks of dirt in the cels.
CG Animation
Best of the Best
Sita Sings the Blues
Since undergoing a knucklebuster of a copyright fight with the rights holders of some nearly 100-year-old music that's integral to the movie, director Nina Paley has made this movie fully free to download with the simple request that you help support her, the artist. Her website is full of merchandise that the discerning buyer can purchase for themselves or a loved one. Though not conventionally distributed, you can obtain the full HD version of the movie and compress it only as much as is necessary to squeeze it onto a dual-layer Blu-ray disc. The resulting picture quality is absolutely breathtaking. It's most unfortunate that Sita is not among the field of contenders for Best Animated Feature.
Best of the Best
UP, A Bug's Life, and Monsters, Inc.
It doesn't make much sense to separate these considering their common source and degree of quality. These, along with WALL-E and Ratatouille, are the easiest no-brainer recommendations to make to someone starting a Blu-ray library. The digital-to-digital transfers are so good because they intentionally delayed the titles in different instances for quality assurance (a la Criterion). As a result, there's not an ill thing that can legitimately be said about these masters.
Best of the Best
Waltz with Bashir
One of the best films of last year melded animation, documentary, and a foreign conflict. The mixture makes it all the more palatable for people who are normally resistant to one of the three components. This is another bang-up job from Sony.
Battle for Terra
I liked this movie a great deal more than it appears my contemporaries did, but it's not as absorbable for adults as say a Pixar movie or a Henry Selick movie or an animated classic one grew up watching. Just because you're a geek doesn't mean that every cartoon caters to you specifically or at all, so calm down. I sure loved Fern Gully when I was a kid, but the movie that I saw then and the version that I would see now as an adult wouldn't match up, I don't think. Terra's from-the-digital-source transfer is as good as you can get without the 3D.
Ice Age 3
The movie is terrible, but one sequence in particular was just gorgeous: a dream sequence in which Simon Pegg's character faces a giant Baryonyx dinosaur in a torrential downpour. That one scene is the finest work Blue Sky has ever done.
The Highly-Regarded But Unseen:
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, 9, Bolt, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Discs of the Year is a look back at the year in disc releases and trends, from the best to the worst.