Aardman Classics on DVD – The DVDfever Review

Aardman Classics: Over the past twenty or so years, Aardman Animations have come to the fore, even though they’ve been around for a lot longer. They’ve made scores of short animated films all of which have won great acclaim from the exceptional Creature Comforts Heat Electric adverts, featuring various wildlife and domestic animals talking about their heating facilities and using the actual voices of real people, to using the singing voice of Nina Simone in a claymation promo for “My Baby Just Cares For Me”, which saw the single go into the charts and make No.5 in October 1987.

Aardman’s most famous creations, which aren’t included here, have been Morph, Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run, the recent feature-length film starring the voice of Mel Gibson.

The following is a complete run down of the content which runs for over two-and-a-half hours and is the otherwise complete collection of the award winning short films from the company:

Creature Comforts Heat Electric: Frank and Carol and Dog Pib and Pog Heat Electric: Parrots and Pandas Minotaur and Little Nerkin Heat Electric: Pandas 2 and Penguins War Story Heat Electric: Penguins 2 and Frank 2 Wat’s Pig Heat Electric: Pigs and Orangutans My Baby Just Cares For Me Heat Electric: Penguins 3 and Pablo Stage Fright Humdrum Pop Owzat

Adam Ident Al Dente Loves Me, Loves Me Not Babylon Next On Probation Sales Pitch Palmy Days Early Bird Late Edition Confessions of a Foyer Girl Down and Out Going Equipped Not Without my Handbag

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With so many short films, the quality is better for more recent short films although some of the Heat Electric ones do suffer slightly. There are no noticeable encoding problems so it’s free of artifacts and the picture ratio varies, but those scenes which are in widescreen they are not anamorphic. The average bitrate is 5.93b/s, often peaking over 8Mb/s.

The sound is a combination of mono and stereo, which will lead to some surround effects from time to time. Again, for some of the older footage, including those Heat Electric ads, the sound is very muffled at the start of each one so turn those up a bit.

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Extras: Crew biographies is the first extra giving an insight into those who work for Aardman including Nick Park, Peter Sproxton and David Lord. There’s also an excellent free 64-page book, “Insideaard”, containing pictures, comments and more from Aardman Animations. There may not be other extras, but since the disc contains all their individual short films then that will do for me.

It’s well-chaptered with 37 split over the 31 films listed above, since the Heat Electric ads are split into more than one chapter.

All the dialogue is in English and there are sadly no subtitles. The main menu has animation and sound in the form of film clips.

The overall marking becomes three because the picture, sound and extras aren’t high scoring, but don’t worry about that. Go by the content score and then go buy the disc.

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FILM CONTENT PICTURE QUALITY SOUND QUALITY EXTRAS	10 8 6 4
OVERALL	7

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Detailed specs:

Cert:
Running time: 160 minutes
Studio: Momentum Pictures
Cat.no: MP023D
Year: Varies
Released: November 6th 2000
Region(s): 2, PAL
Chapters: 37
Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Dolby ProLogic)
Languages: English
Subtitles: English (and hard of hearing)
Picture ratio: Varies
16:9-Enhanced: No
Macrovision: Yes
Disc Format: DVD 9

Director: Varies
Cast: Frank, Carol, Dog, Parrots, Pandas, Adam, the voice of Nina Simone and more