It's been a little more than twelve months since TriStar released this film to Blu-ray before Mill Creek Entertainment threw their hat into the ring as well with a release of their own. Cased in a metallic tin cover, this set stands as it's a Blu-ray and DVD offering. To be honest, I actually was prepared for this set to just have the same Blu-ray that TriStar released but with a different cover. I'm happy to report that's not the case, though, and it's an improvement over the TriStar release thanks to stellar video quality and an array of standard definition extras, although doesn't match the audio presentation.
| Video: |
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Two discs present, so we will start with the Blu-ray. After the dissapointing video track on the TriStar release last year, Mill Creek Entertainment does an excellent job with the video presentation here. This includes a sharp image with minimal noise for a lot of the duration. There are exceptions, though. The darker sequences do have more obvious noise while the movie also looks awful around the 41 minute mark, with lots of noise and looking very blurred. This is an isolated incident, though, and much of the movie looks stellar. Color wise, the pallete is diverse and natural looking. It's vibrant on the rare occasion the film will let it be as well. The blacks could be a little deeper, though.
Second up is the DVD, which you can tell has a similar source as the Blu-ray. Sadly, the video track here shows massive signs of compression. Large artifacting is overt, especially on on red elements, with pixilation and smearing. Details could be sharper as well. On the plus side, the colors at least look nice and similar to the Blu-ray here.
Metropolis is presented in its
original aspect ratio of 1.85:1. It's worth noting that the image isn't cropped either, as it was on the TriStar release.
| Audio: |
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The Blu-ray offers two audio tracks. One is the Japanese track in two channel stereo while the other is the 5.1 DTS surround English dub. Both tracks sounds good, with no overt inconsistencies. Dialogue is clear and the 5.1 surround track has decent diractionality, although nothing remarkable. Sadly, for whatever reason, the DTS 5.1 surround Japanese track that was available on the TriStar release is missing here, giving the audio edge to that earlier release.
For the DVD, a Dolby Digital 2.0 Japanese stereo track and a 5.1 surround English dub track are available. Naturally they aren't as fluid as the Blu-ray offerings, but beyond additional compression both sound similar to their Blu-ray counterparts. The English dub, though, does sound a bit more muted, though.
Both the Blu-ray and DVD contains two, removable English subtitle options.
One subtitles the Japanese audio track while the other subtitles the English dub.
| Extras: |
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The Blu-ray is totally devoid of extras, although unlike the TriStar release it does feature an actual menu rather than just the pop-up menu.
As it turns out, the extras are found on the DVD in this set. They include the "Filmmaker Interview" with director Rintaro and writer Katsuhiro Otomo that was also found on the TriStar Blu-ray. The other three extras are the "Animax: The Making of Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis", "Concept Art" and "Animation Comparison". The latter two are actually multi-video extras. There are three concept art videos to choose from, which total a little over four minutes. Sadly this one would have been really great in high definition, but alas. As for the animation comparison, it's broken into two different videos. The first, the "Wheel Room", is a real snore. At four minutes it goes on for way too long and isn't particularly engaging. The other, "City View", has much better pacing and is more interesting. However, the CGI in the movie has not aged well. Finally, we have the earlier mentioned "Animax: The Making of Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis". This 33 minute feature is the star of the extras, and goes over a lot of elements that went into the production, with interviews of the cast and crew.
As a side note, all of these extras have removable English subtitles and were previously available in TriStar's two disc DVD set. On that note, the only extras of real value left behind versus that two disc set, which ignores a few text only extras, were the trailers.
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This release only sells for around $2 more than TriStar's, and is strictly better. Yes it doesn't have the US trailer or the 5.1 Japanese audio track, the latter being a bigger deal, but the video quality here is light years ahead and the extras found on the DVD are much better than what you'll get on TriStar's Blu-ray release. If you are considering between the two, this is the clear winner.
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