Boasting wonderfully silly storylines, a maddeningly addictive theme song, and distinctive stop-motion clay animation in the CGI era, Aardman Animation’s Wallace and Gromit have gone to the moon, won Academy Awards, and even gotten their own full-length motion picture — but they’ve never gone to Blu-ray until now. Timed to coincide with the DVD release of the new Wallace & Gromit short A Matter of Loaf and Death, the expansive Wallace & Gromit: The Complete Collection brings the doltish inventor and his sharp-witted canine companion to hi-def for the first time — and does it in style, packing in tons of bonus material, including audio commentary and behind-the-scenes featurettes for each of the four W&G short films: 1989′s A Grand Day Out, 1993′s The Wrong Trousers, 1995′s A Close Shave, and the aforementioned Loaf, released
Read More »The Tigger Movie: Two-Disc 10th Anniversary Edition (2009, Disney) purchase from Amazon Nobody raids the vaults like Disney. Even now, in the era of the DVD’s death spiral, most studios refrain from pathologically reissuing catalog titles — particularly those that were never terribly popular in the first place — but Uncle Walt’s house has always treated everything it’s ever done (or almost everything, anyway) like a timeless classic. Which is why you shouldn’t raise your eyebrows (but probably will anyway, if you’re anything like me) at the double-disc 10th anniversary edition of The Tigger Movie, an enjoyable trifle that Disney sort of half-heartedly shooed into theaters roughly a decade ago. Part of a sort of low-profile renaissance for A.A. Milne’s beloved characters at the studio, The Tigger Movie is a kissing cousin to Winnie the
Read More »Ben Rudnick and Friends – A Frog Named Sam (2009, Bartlett Avenue) purchase this CD (Amazon) As kids’ entertainment characters go, “a frog named Sam” isn’t the most original concept in the world — and neither is the story at the heart of this album’s title track, about the titular amphibian and his journey from backwater pond to the big city and back again. Heck, even A Frog Named Sam‘s artwork is fairly amateurish, so a person could be forgiven for having low expectations for the album…expectations that will be exceeded within the first few moments of listening to the deadpan vocals, tribal jam band beat, and — of course — ribbiting of the leadoff track. What Ben Rudnick and Friends lack in conceptual originality, they more than make up for with a musical approach
Read More »Bolt (2009, Walt Disney) purchase this movie from Amazon: DVD | Blu-ray I don’t care whether it’s animated or not — any time I see the words “starring John Travolta and Miley Cyrus,” I feel confident in assuming that the film in question is going to be 100 percent awful. For this reason, I watched Disney’s latest entrance into the world of chatty CG-animated animals, Bolt, with no small degree of trepidation — and maybe it’s just the low expectations talking, but in the end, what I expected to be a powerful new blend of suck proved instead to be an utterly charming little kid’s movie. Bolt begins with a fast-paced action set piece, which pretty much sets the tone for the entire movie; overall, it’s a smartly concocted blend of high-concept plot, beautiful animation,
Read More »The Laurie Berkner Band – Rocketship Run (2008, Two Tomatoes) purchase this album (Amazon) A year or two ago, Jack’s Big Music Show was my daughter’s favorite thing to watch on TV. It was one of the first shows she really got into, actually, and I liked it too — it offers plenty of bright colors, with nifty-looking puppets designed by Sesame Street vets, positive messages, and a parade of cool guest stars (my personal favorite: Andrew Bird as the dulcimer-fixing Dr. Stringz). Due in part to the typically transitive tastes of children, and in part to the show’s abnormally long, Sopranos-style hiatuses, Sophie moved on from Jack’s fairly quickly; ordinarily, I might have encouraged her to keep on watching it, not least because I’d already invested in at least one Jack’s DVD — but
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