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Review: The Muppet Christmas Carol

A Muppet Christmas Carol

review | The Muppet Christmas Carol

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While not the Muppets’ strongest effort, this oddly faithful retelling of the Dickens tale is a satisfying experience in 4K on Disney+

by Dennis Burger
updated December 3, 2023

The Muppet Christmas Carol isn’t exactly the creative apex of the Muppets franchise. As the first film in the series to be made after the death of Jim Henson, it lacks a lot of the creator’s bohemian funkiness and marks the beginning of a transition for the Muppets in which they became a little more kid-friendly and a little less clever. (Although, to be fair, you could just as easily level some of the same criticism at The Great Muppet Caper.)

But—and this is a pretty huge “but”—it’s still my all-time favorite interpretation of Charles Dickens’ literary classic, just nudging out Richard Donner’s Scrooged and the excellent made-for-TV version from 1984 starring George C. Scott. A lot of that can be attributed to Michael Caine’s performance as Scrooge, in which he seems completely oblivious to the fact that his co-stars almost all have hands up their butts. Instead, he plays the role straight, leaving the winking and nodding mostly to Gonzo the Great, who plays the role of Dickens himself.

There’s also the lovely soundtrack, with songs written by Paul Williams, who didn’t quite turn in as many memorable ditties as he did for The Muppet Movie or Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, but still gives the movie an extra heaping helping of charm.

Oddly enough, despite the songs and despite the puppetry, The Muppet Christmas Carol is a shockingly faithful adaptation of Dickens’ book, abridged though it may be. And as such, it’s a must-see for me every Christmas season.

But as with It’s a Wonderful Life, one must ask if this movie is actually worth owning. And for now—and only for now—I say probably not. That’s primarily because it’s available for free on Disney+—in Dolby Vision no less. The service was, as best I can tell, the first to offer The Muppet Christmas Carol in 4K, and although other digital providers have caught up, I can’t imagine it looking any better on any of those services than it does on Disney+.

The 4K resolution does very little to add detail or definition to the cinematography, and unless my eyes deceive me, the current 4K master wasn’t sourced from the original camera negative. It frankly looks like an upscale from an HD master taken from a print (or at best an interpositive), with the only noteworthy resolution differences coming in the form of enhanced (but very inconsistent) film grain.

The HDR does add a lot to the presentation, mostly by toning down the over-saturation seen in the HD version, leaving the most vibrant hues for those spots with pure primary colors, like the inside of Kermit’s mouth. The HDR also brings more consistency and subtlety to contrasts, making blacks a good bit more consistent and eliminating some crush.

So this is definitely the best The Muppet Christmas Carol has ever looked. But hang on. In recent weeks, it was actually revealed that the original camera negative for the deleted musical number “When Love Is Gone” have been discovered and would be included in a new ground-up 4K restoration of the film sourced from the original elements.

If you’re not familiar with “When Love Is Gone,” that’s probably because the song was cut from the theatrical version of the film at the insistence of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Disney, for fear that it was too emotionally sophisticated for a children’s film (something I can’t imagine Jim Henson ever allowing, but it was his son Brian’s cinematic directorial debut). The song was integrated into LaserDisc and VHS releases of the film, as well some DVD versions, but has disappeared from higher-quality releases due, one would assume, to quality concerns.

Whether you’re particularly interested in that song or not (for my money, it’s one of the film’s best, and thankfully it’s included as a deleted scene on Disney+ and elsewhere), the news that The Muppet Christmas Carol is getting a proper restoration is enough to warrant holding off on a purchase for now.

But if you’ve got Disney+, you should still add the movie to your holiday viewing rotation this year. For all its flaws, it’s still an incredibly charming children’s classic with tons of genuinely funny moments and some wonderful performances throughout, from humans and Muppets alike. And for what it’s worth, it’s the only cinematic adaptation of A Christmas Carol that has genuinely made me shed a tear over the death of Tiny Tim.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | HDR adds a lot to the presentation, mostly by toning down the over-saturation seen in the HD version, while also bringing more consistency and subtlety to contrasts

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Review: Jungle Cruise

review | Jungle Cruise

In the tradition of Pirates of the Caribbean, the theme-park ride translates well into a family-friendly action film

by John Sciacca
updated October 6, 2023

Like Pirates of the Caribbean, the thing that makes the Jungle Cruise ride ripe for adopting into a movie is that it offers a perfect jumping-off point for any possible adventure  with the ability to weave in some nods to the ride along the way. Put some people on a boat, set them on a cruise, introduce a quest and some mayhem along the way. The thing practically writes itself! 

I went into viewing Jungle Cruise highly optimistic. Disney has been on a pretty good roll recently, having developed a solid formula for delivering big-action films that hit the right balance of humor and fun that appeals to family watching. Also, I felt Dwayne Johnson was at a point in his career that he wasn’t going to be attached to a stinker, and he’s proven that he can not only carry a big action film but deliver a deft comedic touch—see Jumanji: The Next Level—which was what a Jungle Cruise captain would need to be true to the spirit of the ride.   

The chemistry between Johnson and Emily Blunt works really well. And the opening pre-title card scene with Johnson taking a group of tourists on a jungle cruise lifts many lines and sight gags that are lifted straight from the Disneyland attraction, including the always popular “Back side of water” gag.

I wasn’t able to locate any specifications on the resolution used for filming or for the digital Iintermediate for this transfer, but my guess is that this is sourced from a 2K DI. Images are clean and sharp throughout, revealing lots of detail in closeups but just didn’t give that razor-sharp level of crispness you can get from a 4K DI, especially on long shots. Also, with the extensive amount of CGI used throughout, it would likely be in a 2K workflow.

I watched the film twice, once on my Apple 4KTV on my 4K JVC projector at 115-inch diagonal 2.35.1 aspect ratio and then again on my Xbox One S on a new Sony 65-inch OLED. What I mistook for a bit of softness in the opening scenes in a London University on the projector revealed itself to be more smokiness and haze when viewed on the OLED, but on both the colors and clarity definitely get a nice uptick when the action moves to outside.

As mentioned, closeups can have plenty of sharpness, and clean, ultra-fine detail. You can see the weave in the hats worn by characters or the texture in their clothes or the tiny squares in a screen covering a window. 

With lots of dark and lowlight scenes, Jungle Cruise certainly benefits from HDR. Whether it’s viewing characters in the warm glow of firelight or lanterns, seeing sunlight streaming through windows into dark rooms, we get lots of rich shadow detail and bright highlights. Jungle greens are rich and lush as are the vibrant reds, with several scenes with fire, along with the busses on the streets of London.

Sonically, the Disney+ version includes Dolby Atmos packed in a lossy Dolby Digital+ wrapper. Even still, there’s plenty here to find entertaining, though you’ll likely want to bump the volume 5 to 10 dB over your normal listening levels (as seems to be the case with most of Disney+ streaming). There are near constant jungle sounds when sailing down the Amazon, creating a believable canopy over your listening room, with a variety of birds squawking overhead. When scenes cut from the open outside of the Amazon, you can “feel” the change in the room, just by how it expands in the outdoors, making a really nice effect. There are also a lot of audio effects wrapping overhead and around the room from creaking vines and snakes slithering about, or a swarm of bees that flies around the room, or the splashes of water coming over the sides of the boat during a harrowing rapids ride. James Newton Howard’s score is also given a lot of room to expand throughout the room, making it much fuller sounding.

There are a few moments where the subwoofer comes into play, and these were definitely more dynamic when played through my Xbox versus my AppleTV, which just seems to compress and crush dynamics. There is a deep rumble of massive waterfalls, the explosions of a torpedo, and the low chug of the boat’s engines.

Ultimately, Jungle Cruise delivered exactly what I expected, which was a fun time with some good action, a few laughs, quality acting, some quality visual effects, and nods to one of my favorite amusement-park rides. After the dour seriousness of F9, this struck the right note of how a film can provide a night of fun and entertainment without taking itself too seriously.

Probably the most experienced writer on custom installation in the industry, John Sciacca is co-owner of Custom Theater & Audio in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, & is known for his writing for such publications as Residential Systems and Sound & Vision. Follow him on Twitter at @SciaccaTweets and at johnsciacca.com.

PICTURE | Images are clean and sharp throughout, revealing lots of detail in closeups

SOUND | There’s plenty to find entertaining in the Atmos mix though you’ll want to bump the volume 5 to 10 dB over your normal listening levels

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Review: The Bad Batch

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review | The Bad Batch

These animated series is not only a successful Star Wars spinoff but an audiovisual treat as well

by Dennis Burger
May 11, 2021

Beginnings definitely aren’t Dave Filoni’s strong suit. As much as I’ve raved about his efforts on Star Wars: The Clone Wars, that show took at least a season to find its footing. The followup, Rebels, also went through an awkward adolescence before developing into another incredible series—seriously some of the best Star Wars storytelling in the Disney era.

As the architect of the galaxy far, far away in the animated domain, Filoni puts a lot of faith in his audience’s ability to invest in a long game, but the flipside is that we in the audience have to put a lot of faith in him, to trust that things will pay off in the end. And they always do, at least so far. What, then, to make of the fact that The Bad Batch, the latest Star Wars series to spin from Filoni’s mind, starts off pretty darned good?

Before we dig too deeply into the execution of this new Disney+ series, let’s get some horse-race stuff out of the way for those of you who are interested. The Bad Batch is a direct sequel to The Clone Wars. In fact, the first four episodes of the seventh season of TCW served as a transparent back-door pilot for this show, which follows the trials and tribulations of a squad of rogue clones in the earliest days of the Galactic Empire.

The first episode overlaps with the final four episodes of The Clone Wars and the third act of Episode III—Revenge of the Sith, which is starting to become pretty well-worn territory in the new Star Wars canon. But rather than use the fall of the Republic, destruction of the Jedi, and rise of the Empire as a denouement or conclusion, the new show uses them as a jumping-off point, which quickly leads into territory that hasn’t been explored in live-action or animation.

Not to drop too much geekiness on your screen here but what makes Clone Force 99 (aka the Bad Batch) special is that they’re defective (or “deviant,” in their own words), and as such immune to the programming that causes the Clone Army to become proto-Stormtroopers in the new Empire. Each has a mutation that gives him a special skill but also makes him less controllable. And you don’t have to be a rocket surgeon to guess that their uniqueness will eventually put them at odds with the new totalitarian regime.

Neither do you have to be too observant—although perhaps you do need to be of a certain age—to recognize that this Bad Batch shares a lot of similarities with another group of small-screen anti-heroes, The A-Team, as well as big-screen misfits like The Dirty Dozen.

In the two episodes that have aired thus far—the 75-minute “Aftermath” and the 30-minute “Cut and Run”—we don’t really get a sense of what if any role this unruly team will serve in the impending rebellion. In fact, we don’t really get much of a sense of what the show’s formula will be, aside from the “formed family on the run from the Man” trope already explored in Rebels.

But in a way, that sort of doesn’t matter—at least not yet—The Bad Batch doesn’t stand or fall on a unique premise. What makes the show work already is that it has, established a consistent tone and style in just two episodes, something that Clone Wars and Rebels fumbled around with for a bit too long. It also seems to already know what it’s about—mainly, the internal tug-of-war that arises from being an iconoclast searching for a purpose and a meaningful role in a society that seems to be falling apart.

In terms of its look, the series definitely builds on the foundation of Clone Wars, relying on similar character models and generally following the trend of taking a sort of Gerry Anderson-esque “Supermarionation” vibe and injecting a healthy dose of articulation and fluidity into the animation.

Computing power has, of course, come a long way since Clone Wars first hit screens in 2008, though, and Filoni and his team don’t seem compelled to stick to the style of that series slavishly. The animation in The Bad Batch is much more detailed, and the backgrounds in particular benefit from much more richness, depth, and sophistication.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the visuals, though, is the way  the imagery benefits from high dynamic range. The Bad Batch was created from the ground up for exhibition on Disney+, not broadcast TV, and as such has much more freedom to use shadows and light in interesting and effective ways. It remains to be seen if it maintains this Botticellian chiaroscuro aesthetic as it moves into new and unexplored environments—and it seems it will—but it already represents among the best application of Dolby Vision I’ve seen in animation to date.

Big props are also owed to composer Kevin Kiner, who returns to deliver a very different musical landscape from those he developed for Clone Wars and Rebels. With the former series,  his music skewed heavily toward a Star Wars prequel-era style, and with the latter he had to at least evoke the music of the original trilogy. With The Bad Batch, though, the he has managed to create a new and different musical language that nonetheless feels perfect for the franchise. There’s a mix of traditional and experimental, of orchestral and electronic, that feels like Star Wars without aping John Williams or Ludwig Goransson or even Kiner’s own previous work in this universe.

The sound mixers seem to realize that they have something special to work with in Kiner’s score, because they give it oodles of room to breathe, both spatially and proportionally. At its most intimate, the sound mix is a center-speaker-heavy affair. At its most bombastic, it uses the entire Dolby Atmos soundscape to drop you right into the conflict. For the most part, though, it’s a three-channel, front-heavy mix, with dialogue following the characters from left to right across the screen and Kiner’s music filling the front soundstage, leaking onto into the surrounds to give it some ambience and an additional sense of space.

In short, The Bad Batch is an audiovisual treat of the best kind. And while the series itself hasn’t quite risen to the narrative or thematic heights of its predecessors, it’s off to a consistently entertaining start, which is something that couldn’t be said of Filoni’s previous animated Star Wars adventures. It also seems to be playing things a little safe at the moment, trying too hard at times to recreate the magic of its predecessors. If it can break out of that rut (and knowing Filoni’s past work, I have every reason to suspect that it will), The Bad Batch has the potential to be something truly great.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Perhaps the most striking thing about the visuals is the way  the imagery benefits from high dynamic range

SOUND | At its most bombastic, the soundtrack uses the entire Atmos soundscape to drop you right into the conflict, but for the most part it’s a three-channel, front-heavy mix

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Want to Dig Deeper Into the Mandalorian?

The Mandalorian

Want to Dig Deeper Into The Mandalorian? This Is the Way.

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Season Two shows just how deeply this Disney+ series is woven into the Star Wars universe

by Dennis Burger
January 2, 2020

It’s difficult these days to have any meaningful discussion about Star Wars without obsessing over The Mandalorian. This lightning-in-a-bottle Disney+ series has the sort of universal appeal that none of the main saga films have enjoyed since The Empire Strikes Back. (And let’s not forget that TESB wasn’t so universally beloved until years after its initial release.)

There’s good reason for the series’ universal appeal, of course. As I said in my wrap up of the first season, The Mandalorian is a wonderful deconstruction of everything that made the original Star Wars such a smash hit. In breaking the galaxy far, far away down into its essential components (the gunslinger, the samurai, the strange-but-familiar environments, the wonderful sense of mystery, the thematic through-lines of honor, familial baggage, and redemption) and recombining them into a shape we’ve never quite seen before, the series continues to be both stimulating and comfortable, both innovative and grounded in the past.

One thing I said about the series’ first season no longer rings true after the second batch of episodes, though. In my Season One overview, I made an offhand comment about the show’s “tenuous connections to the larger mythology,” despite the fact that that season ended with the appearance of one of the most legendary Star Wars weapons of all time: The Darksaber.

In Season Two, the connections to the legendarium become much less tenuous, much more overt, and much more central to the underlying themes and meaning of The Mandalorian. And it’s that last point that’s most important, because the simple truth is that you don’t really need to know the history of Mandalorian culture or its various factions to follow the plot of this past season. That history simply helps in unpacking what it all means.

And I can say that pretty confidently, because I talk to so many of my friends who are absolutely gaga over “new” characters introduced in Season Two who aren’t new at all. Characters like Bo-Katan Kryze, played to perfection by Katee Sackhoff not only in this live-action series but also in three seasons of The Clone Wars and one particularly memorable episode of Star Wars: Rebels. I was worried, when rumors of Bo-Katan’s return started circulating on the internet, that she would feel shoehorned into this series, that her presence would feel like fan-service of the worst sort. Nothing could be further from the truth, though. To misquote Voltaire, if Bo-Katan hadn’t already existed, it would have been necessary to invent her for Season Two to make a lick of sense.

The Mandalorian

This season also features the return of Ahsoka Tano—perhaps the single most beloved character ever created by George Lucas, but one that many fans of The Mandalorian had never heard of or only knew secondhand thanks to hyper-nerds like myself. Again, though, due to the way showrunners Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni have woven her into this series, you don’t really need to know Ahsoka’s backstory to understand her mission in The Mandalorian. But I would argue that you do need to know where she has come from and where she’s going if you want to truly understand why she’s on that mission.

The point I’m trying to not-so-subtly make here is that you can go into The Mandalorian having only seen the original Star Wars films and not really feel like you’re missing anything essential in terms of plot. You may get the sense that there’s a larger story unfolding that you’re not privy to, but that’s always the case with any good Star Wars story. But if you haven’t watched The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels, you actually are missing out on a deeper level of understanding that’s just sitting there waiting for you to discover.

I’ll give you just one example, although I feel the need to throw out an obligatory spoiler warning here for those of you who are making your way through Season Two slowly in an effort to ameliorate some of the pain caused by the long wait for Season Three.

In the epic finale of this season, there’s a moment in which Din Djarin, the titular Mandalorian, offers the Darksaber to Bo-Katan after being informed of its cultural significance. This moment almost perfectly mirrors a scene from “Heroes of Mandalore,” the Season Four premiere episode of Star Wars: Rebels. There, a Mandalorian named Sabine Wren offers Bo-Katan the blade and Bo-Katan accepts it, although not without some hesitation. In the season finale of The Mandalorian, she rejects it outright. And I won’t get into all of her political reasoning for doing so, as the episode spells all of this out. My point here is that the mirroring of these two scenes adds an extra level of tension to the finale and quietly tells a tale we haven’t seen unfold in any form to date.

The fact that Bo-Katan refuses to simply accept the Darksaber this time around, when we’ve seen her do so before under nearly identical circumstances, tells us something about the character that no amount of exposition could convey nearly as artfully. Namely, it tells us that she blames herself for the so-called Great Purge of Mandalore and the genocide of her people, an event we’ve only heard about in rumors and retellings.

I could go on and on, rambling about little nuggets of this sort you can glean from viewing The Mandalorian in the context of its animated forebears, and I’ve done so in private conversations with friends who love the live-action series but seem hesitant to watch “kids’ cartoons.” It honestly doesn’t help my case that The Clone Wars didn’t start off with a bang. Even as a devoted fan, I have to admit that the first season was childish and wildly uneven.

But by Season Two, The Clone Wars gets good. Really good. By Season Three, it’s honestly some of the best Star Wars ever made. And by Season Four it transforms into one of the best TV series of all time, subject matter be damned.

So, if you’ve tried getting into The Clone Wars and found it a tough pill to swallow, I recommend giving it another try—but this time around, skip the bulk of the first season. Watch “Rookies,” the fifth episode, then skip to the final four episodes in that first run: “Storm Over Ryloth,” “Innocents of Ryloth,” “Liberty on Ryloth,” and “Hostage Crisis.” Objectively, they’re nowhere near the quality of later seasons, but they’ll give you a good foundation for what’s to come, especially the second-season episodes that really lay the foundation for The Mandalorian, starting with Episode 12, “The Mandalore Plot.”

Likewise, Star Wars: Rebels gets off to a similarly uneven start, and I wish I could give you a similar cheat sheet for which episodes are skippable. But you’ll just have to trust me on this one: By the time you get to the end of Season Four, it becomes clear that there wasn’t a throwaway moment in the entire 75-episode run. It’s simply one hell of a slow burn.

All seven seasons of The Clone Wars and all four seasons of Rebels are available to stream on Disney+, and it’s worth noting that the streaming provider presents the former with all of the content that was censored by Cartoon Network in the original broadcasts. Don’t go in expecting anything overtly gratuitous or vulgar, but I often advise my friends with young children that the series explores the implications of war in a way pre-teens aren’t quite mature enough to digest. So take that for what it’s worth.

Of course, we can’t know for sure how much of an impact the events of The Clone Wars and Rebels will have on future seasons of The Mandalorian, especially given that there’s no clear and obvious path forward for the series. Taken as a whole, the first two seasons of this wildly popular live-action show have told the tale of a man whose sense of self was predicated on a moral code that he never questioned—until forced to do so. It’s the story of a man whose ideology begins to conflict with his principles, and whose entire notion of who he is and what he stands for has been torn to shreds as a result of his own empathy and moral awakening. By the end of Season Two, Din Djarin has succeeded in his quest and as a result is left with nearly nothing—no purpose, no culture, no tradition to fall back on and believe in. As such, where his journey goes from here is nearly anyone’s guess.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that however this story ends up blossoming, the seeds will have been planted in The Clone Wars and Rebels.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

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Review: Star Wars Visions

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review | Star Wars: Visions

The quality of some of these Star Wars-themed animated shorts can vary, but the series as a whole is well worth checking out

by Dennis Burger
September 27, 2021

I honestly can’t decide if Star Wars: Visions represents a huge risk for Lucasfilm and Disney+ or a sure bet. So let’s just agree that it’s off the beaten track but following a path that seems obvious in retrospect, and leave it at that. The new anthology series comprises nine disconnected shorts built on a single premise: Give the Star Wars mythos to nine different anime directors spread across seven anime studios and let their imaginations run wild, with no imposed ties to the existing Star Wars timeline or canon.

Given that the shorts range from 14 to 23 minutes long, with the average running length coming in at right around 17 minutes, it’s understandable that none of the concepts are fully developed, and there’s not a lot by way of story in some of them. But that really sort of misses the point. I think the intent here was to riff on the themes and iconic visuals for the Galaxy Far, Far Away from a different perspective. And in that respect, it’s a stunning success. Every single film in this collection is a wonder to behold in terms of color, design, detail, and motion (the latter despite the fact that a lot of it seems to be animated on threes or fours).

Does that mean you’ll like it? Well, of course not. Even as a self-described Star Wars scholar, there were episode of Visions I simply hated. And there were a couple (“Lop and Ochō” and “Tatooine Rhapsody”) that had potential but turned me off with their hyperbolic, uber-kinetic cutesiness and sensory overload.

But there are five shorts in particular that deserve your attention, even if you’re not a fan of Japanese animation in all its diverse and disparate forms, nor a dedicated consumer of every ancillary Star Wars program to roll out on Disney+.

“The Duel,” directed by Takanobu Mizuno and animated by Kamikaze Douga, the studio behind JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, is such a perfect but unusual blending of Kurosawa, Leone, and Lucas that it feels essentially Star Wars despite breaking so many rules of the universe.

“The Village Bride,” directed by Hitoshi Haga and animated by Kinema Citrus (Tokyo Magnitude 8.0) is a hauntingly beautiful little fable that resonates despite its predictability.

“The Elder,” directed by Masahiko Otsuka and animated by Studio Trigger (Little Witch Academia) is delightfully creepy and, in its English dub, features a great performance by David Harbor of Stranger Things and Black Widow fame.

“Akakiri,” directed by Eunyoung Choi and animated by Science SARU (probably best known in America for their work on the trippy Adventure Time episode “Food Chain”), is an absolute audiovisual masterpiece and a deliciously ambiguous morality tale at that.

But the best of the bunch, for my money, is “The Ninth Jedi,” directed by Kenji Kamiyama and animated by the legendary studio Production I.G, best known for Ghost in the Shell. Of all the shorts here, this one really felt like it should have been developed into a feature-length film, even if most of its substance comes from its style.

Check out those five shorts first if you’re unsure about whether or not you want to dip your toes into this weird experiment. If I may, though, I’d like to recommend watching each of them twice: Once in the original Japanese and once in the dub of your choice. As for the latter, I can only speak to the quality of the English dubs, but they’re incredibly well done throughout, with great voice acting and none of the awkward fumbling that normally comes from trying to match vocals to lip movements animated for a different language.

Furthermore, turning off the subtitles gives you the opportunity to soak in the Dolby Vision presentation of the animation, which looks a bit different from short to short, but always impresses with gorgeous contrasts, sumptuous color, and oodles of detail. (I did notice a brief moment of aliasing in one shot of one short, but I think that was a consequence of production, not the online delivery.)

In either the original Japanese or in dubbed English, the Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtracks vary a bit in terms of intensity and expansiveness but always deliver the goods on dialogue intelligibility and musical fidelity. By far the best of the bunch in terms of sound is “Akakiri,” which benefits from a decidedly Eastern percussion soundtrack almost entirely devoid of musical notes, but which nonetheless feels right at home in the Star Wars universe, or at least this version of it.

Also worth noting is the fact that Visions is accompanied by a pretty healthy collection of bonus features: 5 to 8 documentaries for each short that give some background on the filmmakers, their love of Star Wars, and their unique approaches to each episode.

All in all, Star Wars: Visions isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of blue milk, but it’s nonetheless exciting to see Lucasfilm exploring, taking risks, and expanding the scope of what Star Wars can look like. It may not have been entirely successful for me, given that I really only enjoyed five of the nine shorts, but still—I want to see more of this sort of thing going forward.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | The Dolby Vision presentation of the animation, which looks a bit different from short to short, always impresses with gorgeous contrasts, sumptuous color, and oodles of detail

SOUND | The Dolby Digital+ 5.1 soundtracks vary a bit in terms of intensity and expansiveness but always deliver the goods on dialogue intelligibility and musical fidelity

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Review: Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian

Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian

review | Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian

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Disney’s behind-the-scenes look at The Mandalorian harkens back to the glory days of DVD extras

by Dennis Burger
June 3, 2021

One of the biggest concerns I’ve had about about the home video marketplace in the years since we started to transition from discs to online distribution is the decline in well-made behind-the-scenes supplemental material. We’ve seen some exceptions, like Beyond Stranger Things on Netflix, but bonus goodies of this sort almost seem like a vestige and little more, and they’re far too rare even at that.

I’m not sure if Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian is a full-blown reversal of this trend but it’s certainly a welcome addition to the ever-growing library of content available on Disney+. You know what? Strike that. To call Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian a return to the glory days of behind-the-scenes documentaries that flourished during the DVD era would be to sell it short. Unlike far too many of those bonus features, this eight-episode exploration of the making of the first live-action Star Wars TV series doesn’t have a promotional or congratulatory bone in its body. Nor does it lean on all of the tropes that practically defined the making-of doc in decades past.

Few and far between are the stereotypical shots of creatives or performers answering questions in front of a green screen. In fact, one almost gets the sense that director Brad Baruh has never seen a behind-the-scenes documentary and is making up his own formula as he goes along.

That’s actually not the case. Baruh has been involved in the making of a few Marvel Cinematic Universe docs and even had a hand in a couple of the best “one shot” short films set in the MCU. But with Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, he breaks the mold, structuring the series around a series of roundtable discussions, each focusing on a different aspect of the series or its legacy, rather than following the making of the series in chronological order.

The first episode takes a deep dive into the directors who worked on the show, and subsequent episodes explore its place in the Star Wars universe from a storytelling perspective, as well as a pop-culture phenomenon perspective, along with the actual grunt work of production and post production.

But what really makes Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian such a joy is that it’s wildly unpredictable. Rambling discussions that would have been left on the cutting-room floor in the hands of a more seasoned pro instead become the centerpiece of an episode. Actors, directors, producers, and effects artists are allowed to take the conversations in directions that interest them, rather than simply pandering to the voyeuristic tendencies of the viewer.

(Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the trailer for this series, which seems intent upon cherry-picking the few shots and discussions in which it does gravitate toward tried-and-true territory, but oh well. Marketing people are gonna market. Don’t let that turn you off.)

The series even treats some of the controversies behind the making of The Mandalorian—like the fact that star Pedro Pascal wasn’t really behind the mask of the titular Mandalorian all that much, and was instead played primarily by stuntmen Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder depending on the needs of the scene—with unapologetic honesty.

The best episodes of the series so far are those that focus on the technical wizardry that made The Mandalorian possible, like the advances in virtual set technology and the reliance on video-game engines for real-time rendering of backdrops that responded to camera movement. But at its heart, what makes Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian such a pleasure to watch is that every story it tells is ultimately a human story. While watching the series, my mind has been blown on several occasions to discover that things I thought were special effects actually weren’t, and things I never would have suspected to be special effects actually were. But instead of treating these technological wonders as the subject of interest in and of themselves, Baruh treats them as the efforts of creative humans solving problems in a way that no one ever solved them before.

And in a way, that’s a bit of a metaphor for Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian as a behind-the-scenes documentary. You’ve certainly seen bonus features that aim for the same end goals. But you’ve rarely seen ones that approach those goals quite like this.

Even if you’ve never been a fan of supplemental material, this one is so original in its approach to deconstructing the creative process that you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. And if nothing else, the title of the series—not The Making of the Mandalorian, or Behind the Mask, or anything of the sort, but rather Disney Gallery—gives me hope that this series isn’t a one-off, that indeed Disney+ will be home to future series of this nature, which maintain the spirit of old DVD making-of supplements by documentarians like Charles de Lauzirika, Van Ling, David Prior, and Laurent Bouzereau, but in a fresh new way that embraces the streaming era of home cinema.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

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Review: Zenimation

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review | Zenimation

Disney mines its archives yet one more time, this time to provides its take on mindfulness

by John Sciacca

We’re big fans of sound design here at Cineluxe, as a good audio mix reproduced on a well-designed home theater draws you into the fantasy world and helps you appreciate films on a deeper level. But the work that goes into crafting the many layers of a rich, detailed, and organic sound mix—especially the often intricate and minute sounds created by the Foley artists—are often buried beneath the score, dialogue, or other effects in a scene.

The new short series Zenimation is such a master class in audio appreciation that it was worth highlighting. Currently available only on Disney+, the show description says, “Unplug, relax, and refresh your senses for a moment of mindfulness with Walt Disney Animation Studio’s Zenimation—an animated soundscape experience. These iconic scenes become an aural experience like no other with the sounds of ocean waves, an icy forest and soaring flight. Zenimation pays tribute to both the visual and sound artists who have created Walt Disney Animation Studios’ legacy of films.” Zenimation requires an incredibly minimal time commitment, with the entire series taking less than an hour to watch.

Zenimation is presented in HD with a 5.1-channel Dolby Digital audio and is broken into 10 parts: Water, Cityscapes, Discovery, Flight, Explore, Night, Nature, Serenity, Water Realms, and Levity. The shortest episodes last just four minutes and the longest only seven.

All episodes feature beloved Disney characters such as Moana, Ariel, Elsa, Aladdin, and Judy Hopps, focusing on scenes and moments germane to that episode’s subject. My only real complaint is that they chose to show everything with letterbox bars, retaining a 2.35:1 aspect ratio throughout. That would be fine if all the content were native 2.35:1, but a fair bit of it is 16:9 (or less) which means pillar-boxing (black bars on all four sides) the image. Perhaps keeping the constant vertical height is a better way of staying in the mindfulness zone, but I would have preferred the 16:9 content filled the screen. 

Also, since much of this content already exists on Disney+ in 4K HDR with Dolby Atmos audio, it would have been nice if they would have just pulled scenes from these titles for a higher overall presentation. Instead, we are limited to the audio and video resolutions of The Rescuers Down Under, Tarzan, Lilo and Stitch, and some of the other older titles.

Those nits aside, these scenes stripped of music, other effects, and dialogue with the Foley effects amplified allow you to focus on the specific sound elements that help bring each scene alive, and the scenes flow nicely from one to the next. Remember, unlike a live-action movie, in animation, no sound is captured “on set,” and every bit of audio is created to bring the scene and the animated world to life.

Clearly hear the rippling sounds paddles make as they pull through in the water, the drips of splashing wave droplets, or bubbles drifting up past characters underwater. Some of my favorite audio moments are from Moana, such as the scene on her boat. Note the sounds of her stitching and pulling the thread through the sail, pulling ropes on the boat, and the wind billowing and creaking all around. 

Outdoor scenes let you appreciate sounds of birds chirping off in the distance well outside your main left/right speakers, the rustle of leaves as you pass through a forest, the sounds of birds flapping overhead, along with the sounds of rain and crashing thunder.

Not all of the sonic moments are about bombast, but many allow you to appreciate the subtleties and nuance of the mix. Notice the echoing of Anna’s footsteps inside Elsa’s immense ice castle, the delicate rustle of grass beneath Rapunzel’s feet, the tonal change of the fire crackling on Moana’s torch as she walks from a cramped cave into a large cavern, or the spark of fire and smoke trailing from an incense stick Mulan lights. Or discern the distinctly different sounds used for shooting stars, all of which convey the same sense of motion but with a  different feeling.

While Zenimation doesn’t employ an immersive object-audio mix, the upmixer in a modern surround processor does a capable job of positioning appropriate sounds overhead. You’ll hear the screams of eagles, fireworks exploding, wind whistling and rushing past, birds chirping, the ringing of bells from Quasimodo’s tower, as well as rain droplets and water splashes. There is also a nice amount of deep bass courtesy of things like the deep cascade of waterfalls, the stampede of animals, or the crackling of stones and boulders.

Zenimation gives movie lovers a fun and creative way to understand the audio elements and sound design work that goes into crafting a film’s sonic world, helping you appreciate the art of filmmaking. And with the whole series taking less than an hour to watch, there’s no excuse not to check it out. 

Probably the most experienced writer on custom installation in the industry, John Sciacca is co-owner of Custom Theater & Audio in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, & is known for his writing for such publications as Residential Systems and Sound & Vision. Follow him on Twitter at @SciaccaTweets and at johnsciacca.com.

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Review: Fire of Love

Fire of Love (2022)

review | Fire of Love

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A quirky but fascinating Oscar-nominated documentary about two quirky but fascinating scientists

by Dennis Burger
February 13, 2023

If you were looking for the perfect person to review Fire of Love, I’d likely be the last person you’d pick. I say that because I watch nature and science documentaries the way some people watch partisan cable news. I visit the National Geographic tab on Disney+ more often than the Disney tab. I already knew the story of Maurice and Katia Krafft, the married volcanologists whose work is the subject of this film. And more than anything else, that’s what puts me at something of a disadvantage here, as getting to know these two is at least half the thrill of Fire of Love.

It does give me something of an advantage, though, too, as it lends me a bit of authority when I say things like this: Director Sara Dosa seems to understand these weird human beings. She gets what made them tick. In digging through hours and hours of archival footage shot by the Kraffts themselves in attempting to tell the story of who they were, she seems to have let them be the guides. And what’s fascinating about that is that it results in a portrait of two nuanced humans who in some ways contradict the stereotypical caricature of what a scientist is and in some ways embody it almost to the point of parody.

As such, the film is a little messy and a lot contradictory, exactly as a biographical snapshot of two people over the course of more than two decades should be. It captures the scientific curiosity of Maurice and Katia so well that at times I couldn’t exorcise from my head Richard Feynman’s humorous comparison between physics and sex: “Sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.” But it also does justice to the passionate mission that evolved out of their curiosity—a desire to understand volcanos so fewer people would be killed by them.

That duality is always bubbling just under the surface of the film, and it’s reflected in a sort of dichotomous tone that defines its style. On the one hand, there’s a reverence here, not merely for the Kraffts but also the work that they did. On the other, there’s an unabashed playfulness that’s reflected in things like the Gilliamesque animation that bridges the gaps in the archival footage and the Wes Anderson-like style that propels the narrative.

Frankly, a lot of the latter comes from narrator Miranda July, whose work on the film is one of the few things I’m not gaga about. I adore July’s writing, and I’ve enjoyed seeing her in other films, but in this one she seems to have been instructed to read the script with a detached hipster aloofness that is out of sorts with the imagery and the words. She reads lines like “Understanding is love’s other name” with the affectation of a stoned-but-bored Aubrey Plaza doing an intentionally half-assed Sarah Vowell impersonation.

Still, even that isn’t enough to rob the film of its power. I think a lesser filmmaker would have let this one fall apart in oh so many ways, especially in trying to deal with Maurice as a sympathetic figure. He is, mind you. The guy was a hoot. But he was also foolhardy and a bit of a showboat. He was the sort of fellow who could sound completely sane and rational while describing a plot to ride an insulated raft inspired by the Gemini spacecraft down a lava flow and into the ocean, no matter how crazy an idea it actually is. He’s the sort of fellow it’s hard not to have a conflicted opinion about. And yet, aside from the obvious editorial choices of what footage to include and what to leave in the archives, Dosa doesn’t seem to impose her opinion at all.

She also shows restraint in another key way I found particularly impressive. Toward the end of the film—and as such, toward the end of their lives—we start to get a sense of Maurice and Katia’s frustration, resulting from a disaster in Colombia that would have been wholly preventable had the local authorities simply listened to the scientists and evacuated the villages surrounding Nevado del Ruiz before it erupted. But the bureaucrats feared the evacuation would be too expensive, and as a result at least 20,000 of the area’s 29,000 residents were killed.

It’s difficult bordering on impossible to watch this without drawing parallels between the work of the Kraffts and that of latter-day climatologists frustratedly attempting to warn us of the impacts of the ongoing climate crisis, and I think most documentarians—especially in this Netflix era of “documentary” filmmaking—wouldn’t have been able to resist the urge to underline those parallels, italicize them, bold them, and rub the viewer’s nose in them. But the script doesn’t even allude to them, leaving the viewer to connect such obvious dots.

It’s that sort of approach that makes this my preferred film about the Kraffts released in the last year—the other being Werner Herzog’s  The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft. Herzog seems to have cleaned up and processed the imagery a bit more than did Dosa, as the bulk of Fire of Love is comprised of unrestored 16mm footage, mostly shot in the 1970s and ’80s in a 4:3 aspect ratio. While a few shots appear duped (perhaps taken from the Kraffts’ numerous films), a lot of it looks to come straight from the camera negative, and as such is fairly clean. But this is still relatively TV-quality imagery that was (mostly) shot more for scientific than entertainment purposes, so it isn’t exactly home theater demo material. All the same, you’ll likely find yourself awed by the subjects of the cinematography and quickly forget issues of detail, color purity, etc.

The 5.1-channel soundtrack, on the other hand, does get a little big for its britches on occasion, trying to add some dynamic zhuzh to footage that doesn’t need zhuzhing. But the all-important dialogue is clear and the hyperactive sound mix doesn’t detract from the story being told.

Of the two documentary films cobbled together last year from footage shot by Maurice and Katia Krafft over the course of their adult lives, Fire of Love is ultimately the better one for a number of reasons. Dosa doesn’t cram her own personality into the film the way Herzog does, but she also takes a more childlike and irreverent approach to the material that I think suits its subjects and its subject matter better. I’d love it if you watched both because there are some ways in which Herzog’s film is superior. But if you have to pick one, make it this one, whether it wins the Oscar or not.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Comprised of unrestored 16mm footage, the documentary is made up of relatively TV-quality imagery shot more for scientific than entertainment purposes, so it isn’t exactly home theater demo material

SOUND | The 5.1-channel soundtrack gets a little big for its britches on occasion, but the all-important dialogue is clear and the hyperactive sound mix doesn’t detract from the story being told

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Review: Tales of the Jedi

Tales of the Jedi (2022)

review | Tales of the Jedi

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This Disney+ animated series proves you can still tell a family-friendly Star Wars tale that has real emotional depth

by Dennis Burger
October 27, 2022

For the better part of 15 years I’ve been begging anyone who would listen to give Dave Filoni’s brilliant animated series The Clone Wars the chance it deserves. But even the most devoted Star Wars fans in my life have largely written the series off, either due to the fact that it’s animated or that the first season is an uneven slog. No amount of pleading has convinced most of them that by the third season it starts to become some of the best television ever made. 

If nothing else, the new Tales of the Jedi lowers the barrier to entry into Filoni’s CG take on this beloved mythology, and if that’s all it accomplished it would be a stunning success. At just over 95 minutes split across six short films ranging from 12 to 19 minutes each, this anthology series is an easily digestible snapshot that demonstrates why the writer and executive producer is such a gifted storyteller.

But it’s actually much more than that. Breaking from the serialized storytelling tradition of The Clone Wars, The Bad Batch, and Rebels before it, Tales of the Jedi is a collection of parables focused more on tonal and thematic through-lines than narrative ones. It’s a study in contrasts, an exploration of right and wrong, dark and light, strength and weakness. It explores what happens when ideology comes into conflict with principles, when rhetoric doesn’t match reality, and how circumstances out of our control mold us as humans—but it also underlines our responsibility to avoid blaming circumstance. 

The visual style will be familiar to anyone who has followed Clone Wars and Bad Batch, but it’s a further evolution thereof. What started as an homage to Supermarionation in CGI form has grown into a style of its own. Dolby Vision is employed here to paint with light and shadow, almost as a sort of literal manifestation of the series’ emotional themes. But it’s never showy. 

Take the first episode, for example, which takes place in the small village where Ahsoka Tano (one of two characters at the center of these interwoven parables) was born. As her mother emerges from their hut, the HDR is used to force the viewer’s eye to react to the transition from interior to exterior at exactly the same time as the characters. It’s almost a form of forced empathy, and if it didn’t work it would be just a gimmick, but it works. 

I’m almost inclined to describe the imagery on the whole more in terms of cinematography than composition. There were a couple of times I found myself trying to figure out what lenses were used in certain shots, which is ridiculous, of course. The series was rendered, not shot. But it’s easy to forget that at times—not because the animation is or attempts to be hyper-realistic but rather because it’s consistent and artful enough to make you buy into this highly stylized reality. 

The Dolby Atmos mix functions similarly, not wowing you for the sake of wow but rather enhancing the environments and moods. Height-channel effects tend to be more ambient—at least as far as I noticed. At some point, I just stopped thinking about the sound mix altogether, which is how I like them.

I will say this about the sound, though: Composer Kevin Kiner returned to do the score for Tales of the Jedi but I found his music for this one almost unrecognizable. He has crafted a musical soundscape that somehow finds common ground with Vangelis and Philip Glass alike without aping the style of either. It’s frankly some of his best work to date. I keep saying that, I know, but he keeps getting better.

You’ll no doubt hear quite a bit about how Liam Neeson teamed up with his son, Micheál Richardson, to voice Qui-Gon Jinn at different stages in his life in the middle installments of this short series. You’ll also likely hear about Bryce Dallas Howard’s participation. I guess that’s the sort of thing marketing teams and PR companies focus on these days, but Tales of the Jedi doesn’t succeed or fail based on who voiced whom or which character secrets are revealed.

As I write this, Andor is in the middle of proving that you can craft an adult Star Wars story without pandering to Gen-X nostalgia or devolving into grimdark edginess. Tales of the Jedi proves you can still tell genuinely family-friendly stories in that galaxy far, far away, with rich emotional depth, deeply resonant themes, and without making every aspect of the story a callback to one that’s already been told.

Whether you’re seven or 77, whether you’ve seen every Star Wars cartoon ever made or you just barely know the difference between a lightsaber and landspeeder, there’s something here for you. And if this is what it takes to convince you to get off your butt and finally watch The Clone Wars, all the better.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Dolby Vision is employed to paint with light and shadow, almost as a sort of literal manifestation of the series’ emotional themes, but it’s never showy 

SOUND | The Atmos mix doesn’t wow you for the sake of wow but rather enhances the environments and moods, with the height-channel effects tending to be more ambient

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