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I love the early Van Beuren cartoons too. They're hard to find, but if you get the opportunity to see them, check out Fleischer's Screen Song Bouncing Ball cartoons. Jerry Beck has a couple of disks of them on his garage sale page. Between 1930 and 1933, the Fleischers produced some of the most...

One more quick bit of advice... Always work on widening your tastes and frame of reference. A lot of people believe the lie that Disney is the only "good" animation. It isn't true. I discover amazing cartoons all the time that I never knew existed. And the history of film and art and music...

Well, I've never been a technology worshipper, and I'm certainly not a slave to numbers when it comes to measuring resolution. My personal opinion is that a proper balance is more important than numerical resolution. In general, the laserdisc versions of the Disney features up to and not...

That's your own choice. But as a great man once said, as a consumer, you don't get quality by settling for mediocrity. A case in point is Bambi. This was the first film in which Disney used the intrusive recreation processes that are messing up their video releases. The last DVD release of Bambi...

Another analogy is sound.... Car stereo salesmen love to try to trick customers by cranking up the bass and treble to exaggerated levels to make the sound more full spectrum. This works for electronic music which has no baseline in normal reality. But if you play classical music with acoustic...

Color accuracy isn't something you would necessarily notice if you aren't looking for it, or if you have a reference to know how it should look. But at Disney, the use of color was very sophisticated. They were able to direct your eye around the frame and give attention to areas of focus by the...

Sleeping Beauty has great sound and shockingly inaccurate color. The color of the orange fairy shifts from cut to cut and the balance is so jiggered that there is no way to tweak your monitor to get anywhere close to the way the film originally looked. It's shocking because Disney has tons of...

The people you see in the interviews on the Bambi disk are all employees of Disney in one way or another. That's why they're the only ones being interviewed. Personally, I don't pay a lot of attention to supplements any more, especially on Disney blurays. The audience they are making these...

I watched Bambi tonight, and although it's heavily smoothed, the color balance is retrievable by turning down the saturation, brightness and contrast. All of the ripple glass and double exposed effects are intact. It's actually pretty good., except for the odd scene where they appear to have...

Wow. I watched Alice last night. I have no idea what I was seeing. There were so many weird digital anomalies that I've never seen on a bluray before. The color balances are all messed up. The colors of the characters are massively boosted, but the backgrounds aren't as much. So if you use...

Why would anyone want to play a game when they're sitting down to watch a movie. If it does that to me I'm sending it back.

Unfortunately, I doubt if Universal will ever replace all the prints they lost. There isn't a strong revenue incentive. Digital distribution is so much less expensive. The non profit I work for still funds true film restoration, but our pockets aren't very deep.

I attended a screening of Laurel and Hardy's early silent short Putting Pants on Phillip, and there was a boy about 12 years old a few rows in front of me who was laughing so hard he couldn't breathe. These films don't have a time. Executives seem to think they need to dumb everything down for...

Buray.com has some screen shots of scenes DVD Beaver doesn't show. Every one blown out into gaudy glowing primaries, except oddly enough the Cheshire Cat who has been repainted in with very odd muddy maroon stripes. The Hatter and Hare have been really dialed up in intensity. They fluoresce...

Have you seen the trailer for Alice on the Mexican bluray of Dumbo? When I saw that I was encouraged, but the grabs at DVD Beaver are totally different. It would be interesting to compare the two. More than any other studio, Disney's distribution prints were very carefully timed at Technicolor...

I have seen original IB Tech prints and production artwork on just about all of Disney's features. I know how the colors should look. I know a lot of other people who have as well. For animation fans over 40, it isn't all that rare, particularly in Los Angeles where we regularly have screenings...

Look carefully at the grabs from DVD Beaver. There is a shot of Alice with flowers and bread and butterflies above her. Look at the yellowish elements of the scene. Notice how in one of the older transfers those three yellowish things... Hair, flower, butterfly... are all three quite different...

I can understand if you have friends who work very hard on a project that turns out poorly. I've worked on some lousy cartoons myself. Its fair to stick up for the people doing the work. Theyre just trying to do their best at what they're told to do. The people responsible are the executives who...

I'm going to go out on a limb here. I'll bet five dollars that the image of the White Rabbit on the home page is not a frame grab from the bluray. It is quite a way off from the proper color balance, but all of the colors are off in the same direction so the relationships between the colors...

The difference in the color of Alice's hair isn't particularly subtle.

I've worked in animation for over 25 years, and the attitude of "it's only a cartoon" has been a part of it since the beginning. There was a flicker of hope in the 80s when The Illusion of Life was published and the animated features were being released to VHS and laserdisc in better transfers...

Thanks, Carlo. I'm a fan too. Cartoons matter.

See the paragraph that follows. Disney has the main color model books in the ARL in Glendale. Those books contain samples of every color palette for every character in the picture without any variation for cel density. They have ample color reference on the psot-nitrate features. The reason they...

One other small thing... As I'm sure you're aware, one of the great tragedies of the recent Universal fire is that their library of distribution prints was decimated. This is a serious problem because the studios are not motivated to go to the expense of striking film prints for the dwindling...

Whoever told you that cel densities made it impossible to accurately match colors is making it up. I happen to be one of the two or three leading authorities on animation cel restoration. I own two of the three paint mills Disney used to manufacture all of the paint from the black and white era...

By the way, all the talk about not knowing precisely what the proper color balance of Alice should be is nothing but smoke. There's plenty of reference on Alice. Disney's ARL has everything they need to do a good job of it. The fact is, they may say they spent weeks referencing original artwork...

The fact that these are recreations and not restorations wouldn't matter if we had the choice of whether we wanted to see Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland or a team of computer recolorists' Alice in Wonderland. But we don't have that choice. All we get is what they give us. The history of...