The Movie
Did you know that the Easter Bunny was basically Santa Claus, except he lives on Easter Island instead of at the North Pole and delivers baskets of sweets rather than toys? I didn't either, but apparently it's true: He operates a secret candy factory run by magical chicks and flies around on Easter Eve in a bird-drawn sleigh. Weird, right? And I thought I wouldn't learn anything from watching Hop.
The current boss rabbit is ready to hand over control of the place to his son, E.B. (voiced by Russell Brand), but the heir apparent is busy dreaming of drumming in a band, and so he shirks his responsibility and hops off to our world. There he meets Fred (James Marsden), a human slacker with his own issues, namely an inability to find the right job... or any job, really. Each fellow is clichéd (and somewhat obnoxious) in his own way and their adventures together grow quickly tiresome, while two key plot points--Fred's new career track and a resentful chick's hostile takeover--feel downright forced.
Meanwhile, Jim Dooley's review of Hop is just a hop, skip and a click away.
The Picture
The 1.85:1 Hop was shot on film, and the high-bitrate VC-1 Blu-ray results display not-negligible levels of grain and video noise. Much of the movie is 100% computer-animated and the clarity is excellent, with an impressive specificity in a vast cascade of jelly beans for example. Other scenes combine the animation with live action--razor-sharp and boasting deep blacks--for a mostly-convincing illusion in HD.
The Sound
The frequent music is clean and spacious and packs a potent bass punch in this DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 presentation. There is a palpable sense of elaborate activity in the fantastical factory, with some discrete cues, effective phasing and some keen directionality across the soundfield in certain scenes. It's a fine track really, but Hop is so visually slick that I was expecting a more enveloping multichannel accompaniment.
The Extras
The six-part look at "The World of Hop" largely introduces the cast, and some of the backstory. From here the extras seem to be geared toward younger viewers, many short featurettes that give us more time with the characters and so forth. There's even a new short film that focuses on feathered factory workers Phil and Carlos.
U-Control gives us two Bonus View options during the movie, Tweets that play like an in-character running text commentary as well as intermittent little pop-up animations. The disc also supports the pocket BLU app with lots of portable bonus content plus enhanced control via select handheld devices. There is also BD-Live connectivity with the Universal Ticker.
Disc Two is a DVD of the movie with almost all of the above-mentioned special features, in SD of course, and a unique printed code is provided to unlock a Digital Copy. The particulars were unavailable before street date, but we're guessing it is once again available on our choice of iTunes, Windows Media, VUDU or Amazon Instant Video, in addition to an UltraViolet version in The Cloud, accessible via either Universal or Flixster.
Final Thoughts
Fluffy, silly and at times inane, this one is for the kids, the younger the better. The home video assemblage of Hop isn't half-bad, even if the movie is.
Product Details
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