Toy Story 1 Comes to Blu-ray and Michelle has the early Review!

One of the most obvious films to get the Hi-Def treatment, Toy Story is finally out on Blu-ray this Tuesday. I’ll admit I’ve never been much of a Pixar fan, I find most of their films to be technically brilliant but emotionally hallow. I always come away asking myself the same question, “everything is flawless, story, computer animation, but I’m just not feeling it.”

I’m not a fan of animation that uses well-known big name stars that have distinctive voices. I don’t like Tom Hanks and I’ve always found his voice kind of irritating, in Toy Story it never seems like he’s a real character, its just Tom Hanks being himself. That said, no one could deny the impact and technical genius that is the Toy Story Series.

Disney Home Video gives Toy Story 1 and 2 the Blu-ray treatment it deserves. They both feature absolutely stunning Hi-Def transfers, but the features felt a little thin.

Disc Details

Movie – 1080P
Aspect Ratio 1.78:1
Audio – English 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, English 2.0 DTS-HD, English DVS 2.0 Dolby, Spanish and French 5.1 Dolby Digital EX
Subtitles – English, French, Spanish
Release Date – May 23, 2010

Disc 1

Previews

  • Toy Story 3
  • Blu-ray Commercial
  • Beauty and the Beast Diamond Edition

Features

  • Audio Commentary
  • Buzz Lightyear Mission Logs: Blast Off (3 Min) (HD)
  • Paths to Pixar – Artists (4 min) (HD)
  • Studio Stories: John’s Car (1 Min) (HD) – Animated story about John’s Car. Really cheesy and pointless.
  • Studio Stories: Baby AJ (1 Min) (HD)
  • Studio Stories: Scooter Races (2 Min) (HD) – Animated story about racing scooters in the studio. Really cheesy and pointless.
  • Buzz Takes Manhattan (2 Min) (HD)
  • Black Friday: The Toy Story You Never Saw (7 Min) (HD) – Interesting look at how Studio notes almost killed Toy Story and shows the original version that Disney hated. Katzenberg wanted Edgy, they gave him edgy and he hated it.
  • BDLive

Classic DVD Bonus Materials All in SD

  • Making Toy Story (20 Min) (SD)
  • The Legacy of Toy Story (1 Min) (SD)
  • Designing Toy Story (6 Min) (SD)
  • Deleted Scenes
  • Design Gallery
  • Story (14 Min) (SD) – Nice Feature about the story writing process
  • Production (11 Min) (SD) – All about the animation process
  • Music Video You’ve Got a Friend in Me
  • Designing Sound (6 Min)
  • Randy Newman Demos
  • Publicity (10 Minutes)

Sneak Peaks

  • Disney Movie Rewards
  • Toy Story 1 & 2
  • The Princess and the Frog
  • James and the Giant Peach Special Edition
  • Disney Parks
  • Toy Story 3
  • On Blu-ray Disc
  • Beauty and the Beast Diamond Edition

Disc 2

  • DVD Version of the movie with Bonus Material.

Comments

The new Blu-ray extras are all pretty lame, I wish they took the time to upscale the Classic material because that’s all great stuff but the picture quality on some of it is quite bad, looked like some of it was shot on VHS. This is a very nice package that everyone should have in the Blu-ray collection. Even if you don’t like animation, the quality of this transfer is so rich in detail, almost too much.

Grades

  • Movie – B
  • Video Quality – A+
  • Audio – A
  • Features – B
  • Packaging/Presentation – A

Final Overall Grade – A

EM Review
By Michelle Alexandria
Originally posted 3.21.2010