Pitch Black was an okay movie.  It wasn't great, but it was entertaining enough.  Afterwards you didn't feel that the time it took to watch the movie was wasted, but that was about it.  Apparently the movie did well enough at the box office to warrant a sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick, which takes place five years after Pitch Black ended.  But what happened in the five years between the two movies?  To cover that gap, the writer/director of the two movies, David Twohy, came up with a short story that was animated and released directly to DVD as The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury.

Starting immediately after Pitch Black ends, this animated show tells what happens to the survivors immediately after they left the planet they were stranded on.  It turns out that their little space ship runs out of energy and is picked up by a mercenary ship run by Madam Chillingsworth, a strange lady who collects mass murderers.  She cryogenically freezes them so they are still alive, and then poses them as living statues.  She has quite a collection but there is room for more.

Her mercenaries quickly determine who Riddick is, and after a quick fight he is captured.  She then puts him in an arena and forces him to fight for his life, and the lives of his two companions.   But even if Riddick survives, there is still a ship full of mercenaries between him and freedom.

If you think of this as a regular movie, you'll soon find yourself thinking that it is nigh impossible for a single man armed only with a knife to take out ten guys shooting at him with machine guns.   It's not a show that stands up to analysis.  How did Riddick do that?  How did he get on the ceiling?  These are questions you shouldn't even ask yourself, because there aren't any answers.  If you think of this as just an animated action fun-fest, it plays a little better.  There is the barest of plots, but that's okay, you're just watching it for the fights.  And that's all there really is, one fight after another.  But even those get a little tiring after a while.  Which is saying a lot since the whole show is only 35 minutes long.

One problem I had with this animated show is that it assumes you've seen Pitch Black.  There are no explanations at all:  They don't mention that Riddick is wanted, what the deal with his eyes is, or who the people traveling with him are.  This is irritating because you need to know all of those to really understand what's going on.  Fortunately there isn't much of a plot, so if you haven't seen the first movie no big loss.  Still it would have been nice...

I'm kind of surprised that they released this cartoon by itself, since there really isn't a lot that happens to serve as a bridge between the two movies.  Now I haven't seen The Chronicles of Riddick, but I can't see this short really making any characters more three dimensional or filling in much background story.  There just wasn't too much there.

The animation was good though.  Directed by Peter Chung, the talented man behind Aeon Flux, this show had the feel of Japanese animation and some great action sequences.  But fight scenes, even good ones, strung together don't make a great show.

This would have been a great extra on the newly released Pitch Black DVD.  I'm sure a lot of people would have double dipped and bought it again to see this cartoon, but as a stand alone DVD, I can't say it's worth the money.  At only 35 minutes in length, I think the DVD is over priced.  ADV has their "Ani-mini" series with a single anime episode for less than $7 retail, and Central Park has their "Anime Test Drive" series for about $8 MSRP.  This DVD has a MSRP of $14.95, and that's about twice as much as I think it should sell for.

Audio:

The 5.1 Dolby Digital soundtrack wasn't as powerful as I was expecting, but it did sound full and bright.  There was some use made of the soundstage, and the voices were easy to discern.  A nice sounding DVD even if it didn't rock the house.  There are subtitles in English, Spanish, and French.

Video:

The 1.85:1 widescreen image wasn't anamorphically enhanced but looked very good none the less.  The colors were bright and the lines were tight.  There was just a touch of aliasing in one a couple of places, not nearly as much as I was expecting.  Other digital defects were nonexistent.  I was very happy with the way this disc looked.

The Extras:

There were a couple of interesting extras:

From Pitch Black to The Chronicles of Riddick:  Bridging the Gap:  An 8 ½ minute (and about 1 minute of that was credits) featurette about the show.  This was mainly a promo piece with a lot of clips from the program, but there were some interesting parts too.  Peter Chung briefly went through the steps of animating a show with 3D CGI animation and traditional cell drawings too, which made this feature worthwhile.

Peter Chung:  The Mind of the Animator:  This was an interesting five minute talk with animator Peter Chung.  He talked about why he likes animation and where he gets inspiration.  Well worth watching.

Into the Light: Vin Diesel and David Twohy talk about the characters in the show for about five minutes.

Animatic to Animation:  An animatic is when they scan the storyboard art into a computer and then zoom and pan across the art to illustrate how the finished product should feel.  This is the entire 30+ minute anamatic to the show with the voiceovers, but no music or sound effects.  A little of if was interesting, but I can't imagine that too many people would view the whole thing.

Final Thoughts:

This would have been a great extra on either Pitch Black, or The Chronicles of Riddick when it gets released on DVD.  But as a stand-alone disc I don't think it really cuts it.  The show is okay, but there isn't much there.  It's just one fight scene after another with no character development and little plot.  Don't get me wrong, the show is a fun way to kill half an hour, it's just not much more than that.  Rent it.