The Good

A fun filled tale about friendship between Boog and Elliot.

The Bad

This movie was a little too zany at times.

Open Season is a fun filled animated tale of friends Boog and Elliot and how they got the rest of their wildlife friends mobilized to take back control of the forest. Boog (Martin Lawrence) is a bear who has no idea how to survive in the wild. His life changes drastically when he meets Elliot (Ashton Kutcher), a deer, and someone who feels that he should get more out of life. After some convincing, these two decide to work together for the good of the forest. In the process they mobilize the rest of the creatures and in doing so, Boog and Elliot both learn a lot about one another.

If you want an animated story that tries to make a point while also having a good time, Open Season is clearly the movie for you. It is filled with memorable characters and spot on animation that, while not always hanging its hat in reality, forces us to accept these hyperrealized renderings. There are a lot side characters that poke their heads in from time to time, but for the most part this story centers around Boog and Elliot. In fact, I wish that there would have been less creatures only because I think that sometimes the animated version of comic relief gets to be a little too much.

Open Season is great fun for the entire family and should definitely make animation fans happy.

Features

Featurettes

They have included the following featurettes on the Open Season DVD:

- Behind the Trees - The Making of Open Season

- The Voices Behind the Stars

The Behind the Trees featurette is a look at how this movie got made. We hear from Producer Michelle Murdocca and Co-Directors Roger Allers and Jill Culton, among others, as they take us through the process. This is all pretty standard stuff but it is interesting hearing about how the idea got fleshed out and then was ultimately brought to life on the big screen. The other featurette that caught my attention was The Voices Behind the Stars. Here we see people like Ashton Kutcher doing the voices for their respective characters. What is always interesting about seeing actors doing voice work is how far they will take things in the booth. They flail their hands around, clutch their chests and generally act out the role even though nobody is technically watching them. There's some good stuff here but none of it is really that spectacular.

Deleted Scenes

Inside the Animal Studio

As you can guess, this is a take off of James Lipton's Inside the Actors Studio. Some of the other animated characters in this film sit back and look at some scenes that they did in this movie. Like the gag in the film, what's funny about this is how seriously these animated creatures take their roles. They fawn over their scenes and talk in a way that is supposed to represent how actors and people in the movie business talk. My only question, and it's sort of off the subject, is if people know that they are being pretentious, why do they continue acting this way?

Ring Tales

Activities

The following 4 activities come on the Open Season DVD, they are:

- Voice-O-Rama

- Wheel of Fortune: Forest Edition Game

- DVD-Rom Link/Online Fun

- Swept Away - Scene Deconstruction

Voice-O-Rama allows DVD users to see what the various characters sound like in this film with different voices. This was fun but I had a little trouble at first getting this activity to work. The Wheel of Fortune: Forest Edition Game was like playing Wheel of Fortune with the only difference being that it was centered around this movie. There wasn't anything too special about it but I think that younger kids will probably have fun with this set top game. The other activities looked like fun, it was just with everything that this disc had to offer, I sadly couldn't find the time to get to it all.

Galleries

Commentary Track

Handling the commentary duties here are Producer Michelle Murdocca and Co-Directors Roger Allers and Jill Culton. They talk about trying to help the audience get the characters right away by having them offer introductions, and they also spend a decent amount of this track laughing at what the characters are doing on screen. After this they discussed putting the story for this movie together and that it was done by a group process. As the commentary progressed they joked about certain scenes that were lost, and also discussed the emotions of the songs that made it into the movie.

Video

1.85:1 - Anamorphic Widescreen. Watching this movie on Standard DVD I was quite impressed with how sharp the color and animated renderings looked. I seriously can only imagine how sharp this movie will seem on Blu-ray disc. On Standard DVD this release seemed like it was in 3-D at times. The colors didn't bleed over into one another and I noticed no points in my viewing where portions of the image seemed overly baked or compressed. This sort of animation isn't meant to replicate reality, however it has enough depth and dimensions that that is precisely what it ends up doing.

Audio

Dolby Digital. Mastered in High Definition. Close Captioned. Languages: English, French 5.1 (Dolby Digital), Spanish (Dolby Surround). Subtitled in English, French and Spanish. The sound on the Open Season DVD was solid, if not spectacular. It probably has something to do with me not having any hearing in one ear, but I just didn't get the sense that this movie was as big sounding as it could have been. I am sure that watching it in a movie theater would have been a different story, but as it was this disc played good just not great.

Package

Most the characters who inhabit the world of Open Season are present and accounted for on this colorful cover. The back sees our friends in what looks like an image drawn and put together specifically for this front cover. They have provided us with a very short description of what this movie is about, a Special Features listing, a cast list and technical specs.

Final Word

I feel awful that it has taken me as long as it did to review this movie. I had meant to get to it but I was given it late and then other DVDs seemed to take precedence over this one. I enjoyed Open Season, although I will admit that I am getting tired of seeing animated animal movies. I am not saying that they have to disappear completely, but I think that's a big reason why people liked Monster House and The Incredibles so much. I understand that there is only so much that can be done with animated humans, but I think that animals that act like human beings are getting a tad played out. Open Season does a very good job of trying to merge all of this, I just found that at some point they should have maybe pulled back on the crazy antics.

Boog, Elliot and the rest of the animals are lovable characters and because of that it's hard not to root for Open Season to make an impression with viewers.

Open Season was released September 29, 2006.