Hi people,
I'm the one who wrote the DVD Times review that was linked to a couple of pages ago, and I just wanted to stop by to clarify a few things.
I mentioned the aspect ratio cropping simply in passing, not necessarily a criticism. I know very well that we're bascially seeing everything that would have been visible in cinemas. The point, though, is that virtually every other Disney film animated in a ratio of 1.66:1 has been presented in 1.66:1 on DVD (
Beauty and the Beast being one of the few exceptions), and that cropping
The Little Mermaid to 1.78:1 (NOT 1.85:1 - 1.85:1 is a theatrical ratio, 1.78:1 is the ratio of a widescreen television) seemed unusual. Incidentally,
this review of the French Platinum Edition includes screen captures comparing the new DVD to the old one, which quite clearly shows that there IS material missing from the top and bottom of the frame on the new release. A small amount, but it's there nonetheless.
Regarding my comments about grain, those who are describing it as "a degradation" and "layers of crawling film artifacts" seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding the medium of film. The entire image is made up out of grain particles. No grain = no image. You can reduce the grain, but in doing so, you also reduce the detail. It may be true that the Disney artists didn't want their artwork to be "overlapped" by grain, but they knew the medium with which they were working and would, at the time, have had to accept the look of film as a necessary element of the end result. To go back now and start sucking it out is, in my opinion, tampering with history in order to get a superficially "cleaner" image. It's bad enough when the original artists, directors etc. are still alive, but in the case of films like
Bambi, where most of those who worked on it have passed away or retired, and in any event will have had no say in the restoration, I think that these decisions to fundamentally alter the look of the film, whether by removing grain or overcranking the colours or whatever, are very wrong. It's a "what if" scenario and a very slippery slope. So what if the animators would have had the image grain-free if the technology was available to them at the time? Perhaps Orson Welles would have shot
Citizen Kane in colour if he could have done so, or given it 5.1 surround sound, or included CGI effects. That doesn't mean we should go back and do these things now.
Hope I haven't ruffled anyone's feathers with these comments. The bottom line is that I like these films a great deal and am always disappointed when Disney goes back and makes changes to them, however minor they might seem to some people. I find it disappointing that, the more effort that gets put into these restorations, the less like the original films they look. The DVD of
The Great Mouse Detective, for instance, looks absolutely beautiful, and I'm sure it wasn't subjected to anything like as much attention as
The Little Mermaid.
