Your Friend the Rat and Alberta

Happy New Year to all of you!

Those who have picked up Ratatouille on DVD or Blu-Ray Disc will probably have watched the new Pixar short film by Jim Capobianco, Your Friend the Rat.



Once again, kudos to the folks at Pixar! Not only is the animated short outstanding fun, we here in Alberta are jazzed to see our province featured in the short film! Alberta gets a nod because we are considered to be rat free.
Of course, both Ken and I are excited to see our hometown of Edmonton on-screen too!



Right behind the Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer shooting at the rats, you'll see Highway 1 which leads to Banff, my current home and workplace at The Banff Centre, where we've held our Story, Character and Interactivity Workshops, featuring many renowned storytellers and designers, including Pixar's own Ronnie del Carmen.

The animated 8-bit video game sequence is amusing too!



Images: © Disney•Pixar

Pixar In-Jokes and Self Reference Article

Something I've been meaning to do for a while, but thankfully Jim Hill has already accomplished it: a list of some of the in-jokes, easter eggs, and self references in the Pixar films and shorts.

Thanks to Josh for the notice.

Image: © 1995 Disney / Pixar. All Rights Reserved.

Pixar Short Films Collection Vol. 1 Blu-ray Disc Review

Dan at The Man Room provides a review of the new Pixar Short Films Collection Vol.1 Blu-ray Disc:

One of my favorite Shorts I first saw in theaters was Boundin’. This 2004 Short looked good then, but in no way did that large-scale presentation even begin to approach the clarity, sharpness or impact of how beautiful it looks on Blu-ray Disc. There are no flaws to be found, anywhere, from up close or afar. The same can be said for all of Pixar’s Shorts on this disc. Brad Bird spoke the truth when he said Blu-ray Disc allowed Pixar animation to be viewed as it should be for the first time outside of Pixar’s studio. These Shorts represent reference quality video.

Pixar has been known for outstanding audio as well as picture quality thanks to the amazing work of Oscar-winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom. The 48 kHz/24-bit 5.1 uncompressed mix on this Blu-ray Disc pushes Gary’s effects to new levels of realism and immersion. Surrounds and LFE are explosive and expansive when called upon, and the variety of strange, quirky voices from Pixar’s unique characters are spot-on accurate with no distortion or imbalance with the effects or score. There’s no better feeling watching an anticipated disc and stumbling upon reference video and audio, which the Pixar Shorts Collection, Volume 1 delivers in spades.

You can check out the full review at this link.