Lilo & Stitch: Big Wave Edition / Special Edition
Film: A+
The best animated Disney film of the 2000s. To borrow what I said in
"Is Lilo & Stitch a Disney movie?:
It has heart.
It has drama.
It has comedy.
It has richly-developed characters.
It has amazing animation.
It has wonderful character design.
It has a smashin' score.
It has a well-written story of redemption and acceptance.
It has villains who are not one-note, one-sided, or one-anything (except maybe one-eyed).
It has love.
It has lots of love, actually.
It has family.
It has family acting like family.
It is a damn fine film, regardless of the Disney name.
I could elaborate, but I'd be here too long.
Video/Audio: A
Excellent a/v quality, nothing to complain about.
Extras: A+ (Internationa) & A- (U.S.)
Goliath pretty much covered all the bases.
"The Story Room: The Making of
Lilo & Stitch" is one of the best - and probably the best from Disney - documentary I've ever seen on the making of a film. You get to really know the people involved, instead of them just saying "We did this, then did that, there was this scene, and that voice actor, etc." It's very intimate and very real. About as close to being part of the film as one can get.
The Documentary Footnotes are also amazing as well, because they are excellent branching options (well, internationally, but I'll get to that later) that expand on the already extensive documentary. The
Aladdin: Platinum Edition simplified that in a way, as the "main" documentary is 43 minutes (Producers / Music / Animation / Voice Actors / Made You Look) while the featurettes in each section adds an hour or so more. Even the
Beauty and the Beast Diamond Edition does something similar with their "Beyond Beauty" experience. But with
Lilo & Stitch, because it's a recent film, and the supplements are all basically *during* filming (as opposed to the "sit down in a fancy studio, get some make-up thrown on, wire up the mic, check the lights, and just talk" interviews), there's a LOT more that is said and shown, and again, gets you as close to being a part of the film as possible.
For the rest of the world, the footnotes are accessible either in branching from the documentary, or in an index. And for the U.S., they stupidly didn't include the branching option after each chapter (I think mainly because of the dumbass decision to keep delaying the two-disc set, that when we finally got it, they changed it so that option wasn't used anymore). As a result, you get an index of extra featurettes that are still good, but without the context of "what part of the documentary were they branching from for this?" Hence my different grade for the US. Without the branching option, to someone unaware of how it was intended to be seen, you just get extra featurettes, which really serves better when in the context of the actual documentary.
But overall, the supplements for
Lilo & Stitch are easily among the best Disney has ever produced on DVD. It came during a time when Disney released a fair amount of A+ supplements (
Atlantis: The Lost Empire is another fine example, and up until I bought the 2-disc
Lilo & Stitch last year, I always considered it the best DVD that Disney ever made) on a few films, though they were still generally underwhelming on a majority of them. To date, there hasn't been a Disney home media release that has ever topped
Lilo & Stitch in terms of the quality of the extras and the right-there-with-them aspect of making the film.
albert
). The DTS-HD MA soundtrack was heavily immersive and overall satisfying.
