Heavy Metal (1981 feature film on Blu-Ray)

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Note: This is a review of the Heavy Metal Blu-Ray -- NOT specifically the actual movie. If this seems like a slim distinction, I think I can justify it. The Blu-ray extras are actually longer than the feature film. For practical purposes, a review of the movie AND the disc extras is WAY TOO LONG and unwieldy for this format. The movie review should turn up here early next year.

          This is one of those rare examples where the disc extras are arguably better then the movie itself. (And I DO like the movie.)  

Documentary: 'Imagining Heavy Metal'.

          This is a very thorough 40 minute documentary. The filmmakers have a very accurate sense of the film's overall quality and shortcomings. Layout artist Terry Windell puts it best when he says, "There are flaws, but it's done with a purity of heart." He states this entirely without facetiousness or irony. In the realms of Heavy Metal, 'purity of heart' does not preclude graphic sex, preposterously voluptuous female nudity and twisted violence. The filmmakers state that this is the stuff that adolescent male fantasies are made of. (I've never liked, let alone fantasized about violence, but hey, that's just me.) 

          It's pretty impressive that the interviewees are so detailed and accurate in their comments that no narration is needed.

         A brief comment on the magazine's origins are duly noted. A few commenters relate their personal histories as fans of the magazine, and their admiration for the twisted fantasy worlds and universes it creates. They're honest enough to admit that prolific, exaggerated female nudity was of major appeal as well. (All the creators here are male, and apparently heterosexual Caucasians.)  It IS a film from a very heterosexual male perspective -- a completely accurate reflection of the source material.         

Original Feature-Length Rough Cut with optional commentary by Carl Macek

          "Rough cut" is an extreme understatement. What we get is a more than feature length leica reel. A leica reel is a film of the movie's various scenes photographed from pencil drawings on paper. It allowed animators to critique proposed scenes, and make edits and corrections before committing to the expensive and labor intensive process of animating with ink and paint on transparent cels. At times it is merely a series individual drawings -- the animators simply didn't need anything more elaborate to do their work on those sections.

          This is probably a feature that only a cartoonist could love. If you've ever subjected yourself to resolving the endless series of visual problems that cartooning represents, you will find it very interesting.

Deleted Scenes with optional commentary

          "Deleted scenes" is a bit of a misnomer. Completed scenes are rarely edited out of animated films. The animation process is so expensive, story editing is done in the planning process -- That's why leica reels were invented. Indeed, leica reels, story board and conceptual drawings are what we get here, depicting concepts of the proposed scenes. 

          Curiously, they had the potential to be the movie's best and most important scenes.

          One concept, was that the girl in the rap-arounds would ride a carousel on seats that were emblematic of the scene that is about to be presented (ie: an airplane, a taxi, a spaceship). The over all concept is that the girl literally feels the pain of each scene's protagonist, thus identifying profoundly with the pain the orb has caused throughout history, and steeling her to take action against it.

          Even more impressive is a scene that depicts nothing less than the entire evolution of life on earth from single cells, to plants and animals, to human kind and its history up to Adolph Hitler. The evil orb floats through it all, generating all the evil in history. This scene would have appeared part way through the film, just prior to the scene with the airplane pilot. 

         Creatively, the filmmakers appear to have been about a half step short of the obvious -- this scene should have been the film's opening sequence. An extra 20 seconds of animation could have lead from Hitler to rocket propulsion, to the atom bomb, to space travel. That could have lead to the opening credits, with the car dropped from the space shuttle.

          Of course, including these scenes wouldn't have fooled anyone into believing this was anything other than an anthology of disparate stories, but they would have added a much needed emotional resonance and epic scale to the film. 

          Reviewing the evolution reel decades later, Reitman regretted not including it. His only misgiving is that it could have been so spectacular that the rest of the film might have been a let down by comparison.    

          He admits the only reason it wasn't animated was because they had used up their budget and they already had enough footage to make the film the contractually-agreed-to minimum length.

          The Blu-Ray edition of the Heavy Metal Movie is more than reasonably priced, and is a very impressive, informative release for fans of the film.