The Movie
Bringing the pre-teen heroine of Megan McDonald's books to the big screen, Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer casts young Jordana Beatty as Judy, a precocious tyke on her last day of third grade. She has prepared a master list of dares for her and her buds to complete before fourth grade begins, competing for "Thrill Points."
It all sounds like a lot of fun until she learns that two of her besties are going away for their vacation and doing way cooler stuff than she has planned. And worse, she will be stuck under the supervision of an Aunt Opal she doesn't even remember. But Opal is played with knowing, loving enthusiasm by Heather Graham, the hippie aunt every kid wishes she had. Her babysitting style borders on child endangerment, but her gung ho attitude absolves many sins.
The movie does manage to capture the wonder of summer vacation, especially from a liberated grade-schooler's point of view, but I'm torn over the casting of Ms. Beatty. She's cute as a bug's ear and has loads of personality, but she often delivers her lines as if this were rehearsal, as in I don't always believe what she's saying. Maybe my kids might fall for it, and after all they're the ones for whom this movie was made. For me however the laughs were, as Judy is fond of saying, rare.
The Picture
Judy Moody is stylistically very aggressive, with imaginary words and numbers and symbols popping up on screen every few minutes and it all works. The movie was shot on 35mm film and is presented here in high-bitrate AVC that boasts vibrant colors with a warm overall tone. The 1.85:1 image is mostly clean, although the blacks can go slightly harsh. It even includes a few scenes of digital animation, not Pixar quality but quite respectable.
The Sound
Those onscreen icons I mentioned tend to arrive with a bit of a whoosh, or perhaps bells or gurgling bubbles. The rears are generally active throughout, conveying a sense of Judy's hyperactive imagination, with lots of little touches like echo or discrete horn honks and owl hoots that keep us in the middle of the action. The pet shop is enjoyably alive, and the musical score benefits from a generous front-to-back spread, in addition to a pleasantly surprising amount of directionality in the sound effects. Overall, this DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is better than expected.
The Extras
The five-part "Judy Moody's Guide to Making a Movie" can be viewed straight through if so desired (24 minutes total), although it too is young-skewing. "10 Things You Need to Know About Judy Moody" is an extended (five-and-a-half minutes) behind-the-scenes trailer, and we're also given a promotional video of the song "Wait and See" by someone named Camryn (three-and-a-half minutes). The two deleted scenes total a little less than a minute-and-a-half, and "Flippin Out with the Cast" presents on-set video diaries taken with the now defunct flip HD video camera (three minutes). In fact, all of the Blu-ray extras are in HD.
And when we're done, we can "Join The Toad Pee Club" by scoring well on an interactive quiz based on what we've just seen. Disc Two is a standard-def DVD of the movie with all of the above extras, and Disc Three is a DVD-ROM carrying a Digital Copy for iTunes or Windows Media.
Final Thoughts
Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer is definitely the sort of kids movie that you'll want to play for them while you do/watch something else, so thankfully it arrives in three different media. Certain aspects of the movie bummed me out, but the solid audio and video cheered me back up.
Product Details
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