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Disney films on BD: which ones have they got right? (1 Viewer)

Brent Reid

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I'm finally getting around to collecting some of the classic Disney titles on BD. I project onto a large screen; audio quality & an authentic appearance are of utmost importance. Without turning this into another long thread full of complaints about bodged 'restorations' & releases, which ones are fairly universally recommended as having been done correctly?
 

Ejanss

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And assuming that's out of those still available.
The limited-time releases usually get the best restorations, the "open" titles are the ones that end up rushed or just upgraded from earlier prints.
 

Ethan Riley

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I think they pretty much got Mary Poppins right. Other than that, forGET it.
 

Stephen_J_H

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Also anything produced using CAPS i.e. post 1989. Portions of The Little Mermaid were produced using CAPS, but The Rescuers Down Under was the first feature produced entirely in the CAPS workflow.
 

Johnny Angell

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I think the OP was hoping for specific titles. You didn't say if you wanted 3D. The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast are marvelous in 3D. I've also read the Cars 3D conversion is wonderful. Finding Nemo is also terrific 3D.
 

FoxyMulder

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Stephen_J_H said:
Also anything produced using CAPS i.e. post 1989. Portions of The Little Mermaid were produced using CAPS, but The Rescuers Down Under was the first feature produced entirely in the CAPS workflow.
You would think so but unfortunately not, Beauty and the Beast has ringing on a number of scenes, indeed the 3D edition does not have this same issue. The UK edition of Aladdin also has ringing issues.
 

Adam_S

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From what I remember from watching my blurays, Pinocchio has film grain, which is shocking, and looked very close to the 35mm print I've seen. I thought it was probably the best of the classic disney animation blurays I've seen. Aristocats, despite being a terrible movie, was very film like with a visually exhausting amount of pencil marks from the xerox process, it definitely got the 'cheap' treatment, meaning it is actually a good presentation of what the film looks like rather than a new invention of whatever the current disinterested-in-film executive 'thinks' the film should look like.

iirc, everything animated is suspect because they invent new colors for old films and sometimes even reanimate stuff to get rid of grain. Some of the earlier blurays are better, as I recall, but you can basically expect Disney to do a truly awful job with most of their transfers.
 

FoxyMulder

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Adam_S said:
Aristocats, despite being a terrible movie, was very film like with a visually exhausting amount of pencil marks from the xerox process, it definitely got the 'cheap' treatment, meaning it is actually a good presentation of what the film looks like rather than a new invention of whatever the current disinterested-in-film executive 'thinks' the film should look like.
Channel 5 in the UK showed The Aristocats in HD with the film grain intact, the colours were much better as was the contrast, the blu ray is shocking and they have removed the film grain, it is not film like at all.

Some good reading on selected Disney titles at the site below. I don't agree with their opinion on Pinocchio but they have got it right about several of the titles and it's worth a read for those of you who like Disney animation.

http://www.landofwhimsy.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?search=the+aristocats&IncludeBlogs=2&limit=20
 

bigshot

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Dumbo is very accurate. Bambi can be made to look good if you turn the color saturation way down. Peter Pan and Lady & the Tramp aren't too bad. Parts of Fantasia are correct, other parts no. Snow White looks like a completely different film. Cinderalla is bad. Sleeping Beauty and Alice are the worst.
 

FoxyMulder

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bigshot said:
Dumbo is very accurate. Bambi can be made to look good if you turn the color saturation way down. Peter Pan and Lady & the Tramp aren't too bad. Parts of Fantasia are correct, other parts no. Snow White looks like a completely different film. Cinderalla is bad. Sleeping Beauty and Alice are the worst.
Dumbo is far from accurate to how a film should look on blu ray, where is the film grain, lots of detail gets removed because of that and it's not good and Bambi has the same issue, i think you may be referring to colours when you talk about accuracy.
 

Mark-W

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Sleeping Beauty is worse than The Sword in the Stone???
bigshot said:
Dumbo is very accurate. Bambi can be made to look good if you turn the color saturation way down. Peter Pan and Lady & the Tramp aren't too bad. Parts of Fantasia are correct, other parts no. Snow White looks like a completely different film. Cinderalla is bad. Sleeping Beauty and Alice are the worst.
Bigshot,

After ready your posts for several weeks, I am very impressed with your knowledge of all things animation.
While I know my ability to pick up flaws, issues and concerns in picture quality is not nearly as developped as yours, I would be really interested to see a list, ordered from best to worst picture quality, of Disney's Blu-rays thus far.

There are some I love that you find very problematic, and only one that I cannot even watch because the picture is, to me, nothing but a blurry mess. Color is not such an issue for me, because I am partially colorblind, but I would find it interesting to see how you rank these films in both accuracy of color and general image quality compared to others.
 

JoHud

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I'd also like to know too. I had pretty much put off buying everything classic Disney animation because of how many complaints there were over several of the releases, save the hybrid Mary Poppins.
 

bigshot

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Well if you want film grain, Disney animation isn't for you. The only time they don't scrub all the grain out is in multi plane shots. If you like animation, the Warner Bros cartoon blu-rays are great. So are Olive's two Betty Boops and Thunderbean's Gulliver's Travels. Yellow Submarine, Heavy Traffic and Wizards are great too.
 

Jari K

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New Blu-ray of Sleeping Beauty is coming (Diamond Edition). Not sure about the transfer (I'm not saying that the old release is bad, though)."I had pretty much put off buying everything classic Disney animation because of how many complaints there were over several of the releases..."Since this is Disney, some of the Blu-ray releases are already OOP (of course you can still get them from Ebay etc, but with higher prices).
 

Brent Reid

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Bloody 'ell - have been reading about Disney's bodges for the past few years with each successive new release, but it's even worse than I thought! The trouble is I've not seen most of their classic titles since going to cinema rereleases as a kid; that's 35-odd years ago! Have wanted to revisit them & refresh my warm, fuzzy memories for so long but deliberately held off until I had a home cinema to do them justice. I honestly thought there would be more than a few I could get my teeth stuck into for the time being...

That ranked list a few folk mentioned would be brilliant. Would be even better if we could have a poll in order to reach some sort of consensus!

It looks like I'm gonna have to pick up some of these substandard BDs, with a view to selling & replacing them when/if an improved version emerges. For the time being then, can we have a warning about which ones to avoid at all cost (Sword & the Stone, obviously!) & some examples of ones that are only moderate offenders?
 

FoxyMulder

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Brenty said:
It looks like I'm gonna have to pick up some of these substandard BDs, with a view to selling & replacing them when/if an improved version emerges. For the time being then, can we have a warning about which ones to avoid at all cost (Sword & the Stone, obviously!) & some examples of ones that are only moderate offenders?
I do own a number of the titles despite giving a like this to Thad who says don't buy any of them.

I clicked the like this because as a film fan and projector owner i feel that the lack of film grain is a big strike against all the Disney animated titles, having said that i do enjoy The Lion King, i have both a 2D edition and 3D version, i also have the 2D edition of Beauty and the Beast and feel the 3D edition has superior colours and contrast and also has no ringing issues, the ringing is a small halo around objects and characters in a number of scenes, you can see it in the snow scenes really well, reviewers tend to miss those things, it looks to me like they did a better more careful job with the 3D version of Beauty and the Beast.

I don't think you will find a consensus on some of these titles, arguments for sure, okay a consensus on The Sword In The Stone but others will argue about the merits of Bambi or Sleeping Beauty, i personally feel the de-graining process has robbed both of those films of a lot of high frequency detail and as a result they are nowhere near as good as they could be, i feel de-graining always introduces a slight blur factor, certain cinematographers, i always quote Roger Deakins for that, he says excessive use of the degraining tool puts things out of focus, hence the blur factor, especially the way Disney do it.
 

Adam_S

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I popped in Alice in Wonderland bluray last week, and was pretty horrified. Wretched image.
 

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