In a suprising but welcoming move, the Criterion Collection has announced that it is teaming with PIXAR to bring director Andrew Stanton’s 2008 animated film Wall-E to its line of home video releases of classic world cinema.
According to Criterion’s release statement, “A high-water mark of digital animation, this prescient vision of a dystopian future is packaged within a dazzling pop-science-fiction love story, making for an urgent fable for our troubled millennium.”
See below for the full list of features that will be part of the release’s 4K/blu-ray package.
The Criterion Collection was founded in 1984 as a curated line of home video releases featuring “important classic and contemporary films from around the world in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements.” The line of discs – first laserdiscs and then DVDs, blurays and most recently 4K discs – has seen such titles as Citizen Kane and 12 Angry Men to foreign classics such as 8 1/2 and The Red Shoes. It has shown eclectic taste in the past with concentrations on such genre fare as Hong Kong action with releases from director John Woo (The Killer, Hard Boiled) and actors Jackie Chan (Police Story 1 & 2) and Jet Li (Once Upon A Time In China I – V) and a near complete run of the works of director Wes Anderson.
The addition of Wall-E to the Criterion Collection is a welcome one, as the line has been conspicuously light when it comes to animated fare. In a run of almost 1200 titles between the Collection’s original laserdisc releases and the current DVD/bu-ray/4K range, Criterion has only released a very small handful of animated titles, starting with a laserdisc only release of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira to its most recent release of René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet. Hopefully, this is just the first step in working towards getting greater animated films representation in the Criterion Collection.
The Criterion Collection edition of Wall-E goes on sale on November 22.
The complete list of special features for the release are as follows –
- 4K digital master, approved by director Andrew Stanton, with Dolby Atmos soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film, presented in both Dolby Vision HDR and HDR10+, and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
- Alternate 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio and stereo soundtracks
- Two audio commentaries: one featuring Stanton and the other, character supervisor Bill Wise, coproducer Lindsey Collins, story artist Derek Thompson, and lead animator Angus MacLane
- New programs on Stanton’s cinematic influences and production designer Ralph Eggleston’s color scripts
- Tour of the Pixar Living Archive with Stanton
- Behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film, including segments from early animation reels
- The Pixar Story (2007), a documentary by Leslie Iwerks
- More than a dozen documentaries exploring the film’s production and robots
- Anatomy of a Scene: The Plant, a masterclass with Stanton
- “WALL•E”: A to Z, a new program featuring Stanton and coscreenwriter Jim Reardon
- Deleted scenes featuring commentary by Stanton
- A Story (1987), a student film by Stanton
- BURN•E (2008), a short film by MacLane
- Trailers
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- English descriptive audio
- PLUS: An essay by author Sam Wasson; selections from Stanton’s sketchbooks, script notes, and drawings; and artwork from the WALL•E team
