BAMBI is a good example. The aging of the film gave that particular movie a soft, pastel look that I found rather appealing given the subject matter. When it was released on DVD, it had been cleaned and processed so much that it looked like it had virtually been shot the day before. It looked just like any of Disney's recent 2D animations such as Aladdin. The whole thing looked sort of flat to me and I thought that they had overdone it on trying to remove all signs of grain or age. It looked like it had been entirely recoloured and the backgrounds appeared to have lost some of the illusion of depth. Unfortunately, I doubt that there is anyone who would agree with me that removing all signs of aging from a film might actually be a bad thing because it also removes some of the character.
What? No one is advocating presenting film with age related defects like faded colors. Bambi looked the way you remembered not because the colors were faded but because that's what the colors where!
It has nothing to do with leaving age related defects and everything to do with returning something to its original state. That is where the character lies.
That's my point. It's entirely subjective. I feel that Bambi lost some of its character because the age related colour fading was how I had always seen the film. The "pastel" look of the film appealed to me. The restored film looks good, but I think it has lost some character that delineated it from Disney's new output. All of Disney's "new" output looks flat, especially in the background art. Disney's old classics had background art far superior to anything in their recent films, but the constant attempts to make their old films look "as good as new" has only resulted in making them look like their "new" films, which to me do not have the depth of artistry to backgrounds as the old classics.
