DVD Review HTF REVIEW: Aladdin - 2 Disc SE - UTTERLY RECOMMENDED!!! (1 Viewer)

[Ernest Rister]

Tarzan, Pocahontas, Dinosaur, and Mulan all suffer from what I can only surmise to be corporate meddling.



Dinosaur was envisioned as a film without dialog, Michael Eisner insisted on it, and the resulting film was a mess -- photo-realistic dinosaurs who speak like charcaters from Full House or Home Improvement. The trailer and the opening sequence show what this movie might have been.



Mulan works for the most part, until the third act climax, when the whole thing just slides off the rails with cross-dressing jokes and a contrived resolution that Wile E. Coyote himself would have found implausible.



Pocahontas was deeply marred by cutting out the love ballad, "If I Never Knew You", because children in test screenings grew antsy during the number, and yet that's the pivotal moment when John Smith and Pocahontas profess their love for each other. Meeko and Flit are great characters, but they're in the wrong movie, and like Hunchback, the film lurches between deadly-serious realism and broad cartoon fantasy.



The child-centric elements in Tarzan are an especially teeth-grinding experience. Rosie O'Donnell's voice is enough to make me reach for the remote, and the "Trashing the Camp" musical number is the sort of superfluous, pandering moment more suited to a Don Bluth movie than a film of Tarzan's pedigree. Terk's scenes are the reason for the invention of the chapter-skip button -- she's the Jar Jar of modern Disney animation.

 

[george kaplan]

Well, Hunchback is OK, but it pales compared to Beauty & the Beast in my opinion, especially in terms of score. Of course Hunchback's score is far, far better than Tarzan (or any of the other Phil Collins scores).

 

[Phil Carter]

George remarked:

George, the score for the film was done by Mark Mancina. Collins wrote and performed the actual songs.

One man's trash is another's treasure, evidently; I quite love both the score AND the songs for "Tarzan".

Regarding the Aladdin DVD, I picked it up yesterday. I am SO happy to have this in a proper format at last. Marvelous sound, marvelous picture, wonderful film which I've fallen in love with all over again. This is clearly going to be one of my favorite titles.

Color banding is indeed apparent in a few scenes but it's not too distracting and it looks fantastic otherwise. I've tried the Enhanced 5.1 mix and liked it but want to give the original 5.1 mix a spin next to see whether it more closely matches my memories. (I'm unsure whether the "vocals in the surrounds" change is a good idea or not, till I have something to compare it with).

How I love this film.

cheers,
Phil

 

[RomanSohor]

quote:I have always wondered about the developmental cycle of the films, and how one success leads into another. Do they work in 4's or something (bear with me).

The Little Mermaid - Pocahontas

Beauty and the Beast - The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Aladdin - Hercules

The Lion King - Tarzan

From all I know about Disney here's what I Can say about this...



The Aladdin - Hercules link is pretty obvious, they're directed by Musker & Clements, who were basically told to direct Hercules as another huge, Alladin-like hit, and then they could direct their "Sci Fi Treasure Island" movie...



BatB and Hunchback are also from the same directorial team (Wise & Trousdale, I believe)



Lion King is the movie that Eisner loves most because it made the most money, so he's tried to replicate it. I agree that there are similarities in feel, and the whole "Jungle" thing, which may have more to do with Disney's Animal Kingdom than movies, the true sequel (in spirit) to TLK is Brother Bear.



I don't think there's much of a link between Pocahontas and Little Mermaid... Pocahontas' production was essentially taken over by JEffrey Katzenberg, who decided that after BatB was nominated for Best Picture, Pocahontas would win that Oscar. In Eric Goldberg's original idea of the movie, Pocahontas was younger, and it was a more "cartoony" movie. There was supposed to be a talking turkey, voiced by John Candy in the film. Katzenberg decided it would have to be serious to be a best picture winner, and so they ended up with a movie that could have essentially been a live-action movie, and not a great one at that. They focus-grouped it to death and ruined it.

 

[MuneebM]

quote:The Enhanced Home Theater mix is certainly more dynamic than the regular 5.1 however I do find it distracting that during the songs that the lead vocals are the same volume in the rears as in the mains.

I'm glad to see that at least somebody on this thread is still discussing the Aladdin DVD, which is afterall the topic of this thread, and not the Disney corporation and their many decisions/mistakes! I agree with you that the Disney Enhanced Home Theater mix was more dynamic and I actually liked the fact that the vocals during the songs were right in the center of my room. During the songs I would switch back to the regular 5.1 mix and it sounded like a 2-channel mix compared to the Disney Enhanced one.



http://66.46.69.23/sigserv/pl/index.pl?p=125


My DVD Collection

 

[Ernest Rister]

I think the Aladdin DVD has the best of the "making of" docs of the Platinum series. It's not the best "making of" doc on a Disney DVD - that title goes to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, followed by Tron: 20th Anniversary Edition and Disc 1 of the Fantasia Anthology. But of the 4 Platinum series so far, Aladdin takes the crown. I was especially taken with Eric Goldberg's inside story on how his love for Herschfeld transformed the look of the movie -- no computer CGI puppet could ever replicate the line work in Aladdin, and it gives me hope that some day hand-drawn animation will make a return, as people realize what has been lost in the mad dash for photo-realism. I also liked the pre-pro pencil tests, and the first take of "A Whole New World". Fun stuff.



I haven't watched Aladdin in maybe 5 years, maybe more. It's been fun rediscovering the movie. Some aspects worked better than I remembered, some worked less. I could live without the Jessica/Nick schmaltz fest -- if you're going to do these things, shouldn't you choose artists capable of creating an original take on the material? There was a terrific album released in 1988 called Stay Awake, and on it, acclaimed artists of wide backgrounds were brought in to cover Disney songs. It was madly original. The Jessica/Nick version is the opposite end of that spectrum. If there is a black hole of the imagination, where nothing of originality or creativity can escape, you'll find Nick and Jessica warbling away inside of it.



Still, on the whole, the disc is a joy, and I thank the producers for the hard work they put into it. Much appreciated.

 

[MatthewLouwrens]

This one?
The Rise and Fall of Disney Animation

Great series of articles. Highly recommended.

 

[DaViD Boulet]

quote:The Enhanced Home Theater mix is certainly more dynamic than the regular 5.1 however I do find it distracting that during the songs that the lead vocals are the same volume in the rears as in the mains.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



I'm glad to see that at least somebody on this thread is still discussing the Aladdin DVD, which is afterall the topic of this thread, and not the Disney corporation and their many decisions/mistakes! I agree with you that the Disney Enhanced Home Theater mix was more dynamic and I actually liked the fact that the vocals during the songs were right in the center of my room. During the songs I would switch back to the regular 5.1 mix and it sounded like a 2-channel mix compared to the Disney Enhanced one.

Muneeb,



Sounds like your system imaged the vocals the way my instincts hinted was the intend of the mixing engineer. Would you describe your surround system? Are your rear speakers direct-radiating? With my dipole surrounds the rear-speaker vocals were a real distraction and just "muddied" the sound...but I'm curious how it might have had a different impression had the vocal tracks "imaged" in the center of the room as I suspect was the intent.



-dave

 

[MuneebM]

quote:Muneeb,

Sounds like your system imaged the vocals the way my instincts hinted was the intend of the mixing engineer. Would you describe your surround system? Are your rear speakers direct-radiating? With my dipole surrounds the rear-speaker vocals were a real distraction and just "muddied" the sound...but I'm curious how it might have had a different impression had the vocal tracks "imaged" in the center of the room as I suspect was the intent.

I have a 6.1 system, all speakers timbre-matched front and rear. All speakers are from the JBL Studio Series II line: fronts are JBL S310II, center is JBL S-Center II, and 3 direct-radiating surrounds are JBL S36II. All 6 speakers are powered by a Yamaha RX-V2400. I used the Yamaha YPAO auto-calibration system to determine correct speaker distances and for parametric equalization of all my speakers. All speaker levels are SPL tweaked using an analog Rat Shack SPL meter and a combination of Avia and Digital Video Essentials. Furthermore, I installed all my speakers at optimal locations with respect to the primary seating position, e.g. front speakers toed in at just the right angles, center speaker tilted downwards slightly, surround speakers above and just slightly behind primary position, surround back speaker far enough behind primary position. I had also enabled the EX decoding on my receiver while watching Aladdin.

http://66.46.69.23/sigserv/pl/index.pl?p=129

My DVD Collection

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Excellent response. Thank-you. Great set-up.



Yours is precisely the type of set-up that would accomodate what I *think* the mixer was trying to do...to have the lead vocals image in the *middle* of the room. Direct-radiating/timbre-matched rear speakers positioned optimally so that everything is time-aligned for the listener positioned in the "sweat spot" is exactly what's required...and that's your system!



-dave

 

[Ernest Rister]

I have nothing but respect for Terry Porter, but I don't favor his experiment. Even coming from "the middle of the room", it still disembodies the vocals from the front stage. I get a weird sensation of quadraphonic deja vu (anyone else born in the 70's?).



I wish he had been this bold with his 5.0 mix of Fantasia -- the historical notes for the film suggest an effect during the Ave Maria where it sounded like the chorus started in the back of the house and progressed towards the screen as the sequence went on. Maybe in 2008, we'll all live to see a 6.1 dts-es treatment of Fantasia, with more bold use of the surrounds.

 

[Yee-Ming]

Nice review David

5 pages on and no one bought the gift set? I'm trying to decide whether or not to go that route, and would appreciate comments from any owners, or from those who've had a chance to look over the book, which to me is the thing potentially of interest.

 

[DonRoeber]

I bought the gift set. The book is nice. It's filled with animation from the films, and a little bit of discussion about how the film came to be. The prints are nice too. My senitype was from the whole new world scene, don't know if they're all like that or not. The DVD is exactly the same as the non-gift set version. Same packaging and all. So you're really just buying the book, prints and box. If I recall correctly, Lion King worked the same way.

 

[Jaime_Weinman]

The untimely death of Howard Ashman may have also had something to do with the problems of some of Disney's mid-'90s movies. Ashman not only wrote the lyrics, he was a producer on Mermaid and Beauty and did some story-development work on Aladdin before his death. But apart from that, he was a songwriter who was ideally suited for this kind of animated musical. Tim Rice, who finished the Aladdin score and did Lion King, isn't as good as Ashman, but he did a good job of writing the right kind of songs for these projects.



But Stephen Schwartz, who did the lyrics for Pocahontas and Hunchback and Katzenberg's own Prince of Egypt, went for this overstuffed, over-written kind of song without much to animate to (Howard Ashman famously filled his lyrics with references to specific physical objects and animals and actions that the animators could then put onscreen). After "Pocahontas" and "Hunchback," people were suddenly grumbling about all the pointless singing in Disney musicals, but people weren't saying that after Mermaid or Beauty or Aladdin -- because the songs in those movies just felt like part of the action, whereas in Pocahontas and Hunchback they felt like intrusions. Maybe that kind of overblown style is what Katzenberg liked.

EDIT: I notice that the guy at SaveDisney, "Merlin Jones," said more or less the same thing in another essay:


After Ashman's death the Disney executives wanted to make musicals in the big, overblown, politically-correct style of the Broadway of the '90s, whereas Ashman obviously loved old-fashioned musical comedy, and combined that with old-fashioned Disney storytelling.

 

[Ernest Rister]

"But Stephen Schwartz, who did the lyrics for Pocahontas and Hunchback and Katzenberg's own Prince of Egypt, went for this overstuffed, over-written kind of song without much to animate to (Howard Ashman famously filled his lyrics with references to specific physical objects and animals and actions that the animators could then put onscreen)."

I'm not quite sure I buy that criticism -- my perspective on Disney films takes the totality of their body of work into account, and I'm not convinced that "God Help the Outcasts" or "If I Never Knew You" was any harder to visualize than, say, "Sing Sweet Nightinghale" or "So This is Love" in Cinderella, "Little April Shower" or "I Bring You a Song" in Bambi, "Your Mother and Mine" in Peter Pan, "Very Good Advice" in Alice in Wonderland, "Once Upon a Dream" in Sleeping Beauty, etc. "Baby Mine" in Dumbo doesn't give specifc direction to the animators, but that song is particularly effective as a moment of emotional release. In othr words, different songs are used for different uses in different movies. I don't think the glib, clever wordplay of Ashman would work for a film like Pocahontas or Hunchback.

A prime example is the only woeful number in Hunchback -- the one that sounds the most like a classic Ashman/Menken tune -- "A Guy Like You". It's simply out of place. Good song with fun lyrics, its simply in the wrong movie. With some tweaks, "A Guy Like You" would fit in Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast or Little Mermaid or Hercules. It doesn't fit in Hunchback, though, just as it wouldn't fit in Bambi or Sleeping Beauty.

I also don't find Hunchback to be politcally correct in the slightest, but I suppose every person defines political correctness in their own way.

 

[Bob_S.]

Bought this on street date. Aladdin is my second favorite Disney movie right after Peter Pan. I'm not a big Clay Aiken fan but I really enjoyed the "Proud of My Boy" music video. I thought he did a really good job on it.

 

[Jaime_Weinman]

I have to admit I wasn't really thinking about the songs from the "classic" Disney movies, because most of those were not full-fledged musical "numbers" -- they tended to use short songs that complimented the action (and were often written after the action had already been worked out at the storyboard). When they did do a longer self-contained musical number, like "When I See a Elephant Fly," the lyricist did come up with lyrics that contained more specific images. And even that isn't a big number.



What Mermaid started was the idea of doing big, three-minute numbers in the style of a full-fledged Broadway or Hollywood musical. That often meant that the action was created around the song, rather than vice-versa. And that makes it very important that the song carry the action forward, rather than stopping it.



Maybe "politically correct" was the wrong term to use about Hunchback, but I do think that the themes about racism and sexual repression and stuff were a bit more than a movie like this could handle (unless they were willing to go all the way and do a totally serious version of the story, which of course they weren't). A Disney feature tends to be more at home with simple themes, e.g. just be yourself, beauty is only skin-deep, don't go to strange islands run by scary guys, etc.

 

[Ernest Rister]

"I have to admit I wasn't really thinking about the songs from the "classic" Disney movies, because most of those were not full-fledged musical "numbers" -- they tended to use short songs that complimented the action (and were often written after the action had already been worked out at the storyboard). When they did do a longer self-contained musical number, like "When I See a Elephant Fly," the lyricist did come up with lyrics that contained more specific images. And even that isn't a big number."



The musical sequences in Walt's narrative films, by and large, are central to the plot, you can't snip them out and not lose great heaping chunks of story or specific character info. On the Aladdin DVD, one of the co-directors states specifically that Ashman and Menken were returning to that tradition, as the post-Walt films had somewhat abandoned it, using music as "an afterthought".



As a matter of fact, if you look at the opening of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, you'll notice that the Beauty and the Beast team recycled it for the opening of their film...a character walks through town with his nose stuck in a book, while the whole town sings about how odd he is. Meanwhile, the town's strapping He-man in the red shirt looks on with amusement -- its not hard to see a more virtuous Gaston in Ichabod's Braum Bones.



As for big numbers, the history of Disney feature animation is replete with them -- "Silly Song" in Snow White, "I've Got No Strings" in Pinocchio, "Pink Elephants on Parade" in Dumbo, "Brazil" in Saludos Amigos, "Ous Quindin y Ya Ya" in Three Caballeros, "All the Cats Join In" in Make Mine Music, "All in the Golden Afternoon" in Alice in Wonderland, "He's a Tramp" in Lady and the Tramp, the list just goes on and on, especially when the Sherman Bros. enter the picture.



Now, I'll give you that Ashman and Menken's off-broadway background is apparent in songs like "Be Our Guest" and "Friend Like Me" and "Under the Sea", but are they really that different from "Everybody Wants to Be a Cat", "I Wanna Be Like You" and "Supercalifragilesticexpialidocious"?

"A Disney feature tends to be more at home with simple themes, e.g. just be yourself, beauty is only skin-deep, don't go to strange islands run by scary guys, etc."

I think Dumbo has more going on beneath the surface than most people realize -- considering that the only people who welcome Dumbo and accept him are the crows, and also considering the film's theme (the persecution of people who are physically different from the majority) -- in a way, the film is an argument for diversity.

The Pinocchio fable is a metaphor that asks us to think about what defines a human being. Fantasia is a celebration of man's imagination and powers of creation. Bambi is a poem of sorts about nature and man's position as an enemy of the natural world. Lady and the Tramp isn't about dogs -- its about judging people (or misjudging people) based on their social class. The quiet little theme in 101 Dalmatians is respect for life. The annoying failure of Sword in the Stone is that it has a potentially great theme -- knowledge is more powerful than physical strength -- and then doesn't do anything with it. Wart's knowledge is not what pulls the sword from the stone. It was luck and chance that he even came across it in the first place. But I digress.

The reason the classic Walt films have been around for so long and are embraced by generation after generation is because they do have things of value to say and contribute. They aren't facile or shallow - in fact there is more going on in these films than they are usually given credit for.

 

[Tim_C]

DonRoeber, my senitype was also from the Whole New World sequence (funny, because I had no idea what a senitype was before I bought this set.) I have no complaints about the gift set - it doesn't have a ton of extra information about the film (though the book is pretty nice,) but I just love big box sets like these for some reason. (Of course once I move out of the house for college I'll probably have to stop buying large box sets due to space constraints.)



I just watched the film again today for the first time in several years and loved it as much as I remembered. A really great film.

 

[Mark Bendiksen]

I know it's slightly off-topic, but I have chime in that I also believe Howard Ashman was one of the most gifted lyricists for Disney and for musical theater. Just listen to the lyrics to Little Shop of Horrors sometime. The man was truly gifted, IMHO.