I really do like The Crimson Wing Blu-ray. It had a great, contained story about the life of one creature. You got to see all aspects of that life and basically got to walk with the animal from birth to death. With Oceans it feels a bit different. Instead of focusing in on one topic, you are taken through a tour of the world’s oceans. You get to see a large variety of sea creatures and have them captured beautifully in HD in their most interesting moments. For example, there is a moment in the film where a school of fish is swimming trying not to get eaten, but find themselves in a feeding frenzy between sharks, birds and every type of predator you can imagine. The moment of the scene that truly grabs you is when the birds dive into the ocean to retrieve the fish. It’s like watching an animal orchestra slowly and majestically playing music.
You get a ton of these scenes within this documentary. The job the filmmakers and cinematographers did was beyond describable, as they captured the perfect moments for almost every creature they put in the film.
With that said, I did have a bit of an issue with Oceans. While I loved the moments the filmmakers caught and put together, the order they put them in felt a bit disjointed. Even with the wonderful voice over from Pierce Brosnan the story put together with Oceans can’t touch what The Crimson Wing ended up delivering. Maybe it was just a different method, but whatever it might be it didn’t work as well. It felt like it simply jumped around instead of having some sort of solid connection between ocean shoots.
Still, the overall entertainment from beginning to end is high, but don’t expect a solid story like The Crimson Wing delivers.
With all of this said, let’s talk about the Blu-ray portion of this film. The HD quality of this film is damn good. You get all the crisp watery details of the oceans, all the scaly, slimy goodness of the animals and all the types of details you would come to respect out of an HD shot film. In comparison to The Crimson Wing this can’t even come close to that quality. Oceans suffers from different environment changes, water changes and extremely diverse details from place to place. Also, it probably doesn’t help that most of the shots occur underwater, which could lend some big differences. Still, the video quailty is more impressive than a DVD (by and large), as you truly do get some fantastic details in the moments that you wouldn’t normally see on a DVD. For example, towards the end of the feature you’re going to find a mother sea lion teaching its young to swim. The shear shiny detail of the ice she’s laying on as she’s peering her head through a cutout hole in the ice is breathtaking. You will appreciate the visuals.
Just as good as The Crimson Wing is the audio, if not more so. I am unbelievably impressed with the detailed underwater audio that they acquired for this feature. For example, there is a giant manatee eating ocean grass and you can hear all the sucking and chomping sounds of the grass; just like a cow eating grass in a pasture. I’m just speechless on how they achieved such a beautiful set of sounds and I’m intrigued on what went into doing such a thing. Anyway, the audio does outperform the video, but not by much.
Finally, as for features, here’s what you’re looking at on Oceans:
– Living Menus
– Filmmaker annotations
– Make a Wave (Music video)
– Disney & Nature: Preserving The World We Share
– Deeper in the Ocean
While not as abundant and interesting as The Crimson Wing, the features you get are decent. The biggest feature is the living menu that comes with the Blu-ray. You can instantly jump to different portions of the world to learn about facts relating to the Oceans release and facts about the area you’ve selected. What’s even cooler is that you get some video facts too on this menu. For example, when you select the coast of South Africa you a nice little bit of information about the leaping sharks, as well as some great video. I’m highly impressed with the living menus and they more than make up for the lack of true special features.