Elephants Dream is officially available as the first European HD DVD title beyond the USA and Japan. The title, produced by Imagion AG, based in Trierweiler (Germany), thus heralds the start of the next generation formats. The goal of the German authoring studio: to turn this pioneering release into a reference product that impressively demonstrates the vast possibilities of the new format. The ambition of Ton Roosendaal and his movie production team, who created the animated film with limited funds, was transferred to the developers of the HD DVD. Numerous bonus contents complement the first-rate Elephants Dream HD DVD video stored in full high definition resolution (1080p). In addition to several audio commentaries, subtitles and Making of“ documentaries, a „script-to-scene“ feature is also included. However, along with a picture-in-picture Making of documentary that is synchronised with the movie and can be freely positioned on the screen, the highlights of the disc are the various encoding variants. For example, the main film is stored on the disc as both a VC-1 and MPEG-2 video, which allows the user to compare the quality of the formats.

For several weeks already, the computer-generated short film, which was primarily created with free, open source software, has been attracting great interest worldwide and is enjoying a steadily growing fan community. Proog (Tygo Gernandt) takes young Emo (Cas Jansen) on a trip into the depths of a surreal machine world. The unlikely pair makes their way through to the seemingly safest place in the entire machine, only to find out that it also has some surprises in store for them.

The Elephants Dream HD DVD impressively demonstrates just how big the difference between full resolution high definition video and conventional SD video really is. As a bonus feature, the Imagion AG developer team has therefore included an option that allows segments of the movie to be compared in HD and SD resolution. Moreover, as an interactive feature, the user can seamlessly switch back and forth between HD and SD video or select a horizontal or vertical split screen display.