A Few Words About A few words about... Walt Disney's Bambi... (1 Viewer)

[Jay Pennington]

As someone stated, I have no problem with restorations that repair damage incurred after the initial release. Faded color, print damage, etc. If they're bringing it back to how the negative looked before it was used to make release prints, I'm pleased.

But I almost always want a DVD to present me with a film the way it was originally seen by audiences on opening day. Even if (I'm making this up) Reel Three had been processed without the cyan layer accidentally, if the negative was like that. Yes, I'm an extremist, but to me a good film is not only a movie but a historical document, and I want any restoration to be approached with an almost archeological mindset. This is why I am not getting rid of my Lion King laserdisc, as the DVD contains a few replaced shots. The errors in Bambi are a snapshot of the conditions at Disney at the time. Fix them, and the film's use as a study of film history is lessened. I don't want to see what Walt "would have done". Would have, could have...didn't. I want to view film history, not a theoretical alternate one.

Now, I also appreciate the desire to fix things, and enjoy seeing the results of such work. Added material, too--for instance, I have both the theatrical and extended DVDs of the LOTR films.

So give us both. But if it comes down to one or the other, the original wins with me. New fixes are fun but should never supplant the availability of the original.

...at least with films important to me, that is. I admit that for "guilty pleasure" titles that I enjoy but am not particularly passionate about, I might just go with extended versions: for example, I won't be double-dipping on Kill Bill or Team America, but am refraining from purchasing the theatrical cuts in favor of waiting for SEs. But in both cases the theatrical versions are available, which is the ideal I prefer.

 

[Robert Harris]

Correcting what are considered to be "errors" and updating archaic production and post-production techniques can be a thorny issue in film restoration.

In the past, Disney has created entirely new versions of its animated films for DVD, which (although beutiful unto themselves) looked nothing like the originals. I look upon these as new editions for a new, and more keen-eyed audience. And I'm okay with them. The originals survive and can be accessed.

The important factor is that the originals always survive and be preserved for posterity should someone need to view the original -- flaws and all.

I have no problem with technicians at Disney correcting flaws which would have been corrected had the time and funds been available to do so.

In the same light, if I were working on Ben-Hur or The African Queen, the first thing that I would do after backing up the original elements, would be to digitally remove the matte lines, which to a modern audience, will be offensive to a point of stopping the natural flow of the film. Decades ago they were state of the art.

I'm delighted with the 2005 Bambi, minor tweaks and all. It is still a much closer representation of the original than any of the previous DVD classics releases. Taking the original negative and printing it today to modern stocks is going to give you a different look than was achieved via the three-strip Technicolor process in 1942. Contrast will be up slightly (which is not a problem on the DVD), with better blacks; color will be slightly heightened, and the image will have an overall sharper appearance, making cell defects even more obvious than they would have been sixty years ago. All of this means that the image must be adjusted no matter which way one wishes to proceed.

Disney has hit the proper balance between updating a film for modern audiences while not totally eliminating the original look.

Regarding the mattes around main titles, I'm afraid that I don't recall this at all. Is it possible that the 1980s's VHS release had been adapted via windowbox so that the main titles would not be cropped on by overscan on the viewers black and white Dumont?

 

[Ira Siegel]

Robert, Ernest, THANKS for great commentary and history!!
Edwin writes:
I'm pretty much with Edwin on this. Of course, if a film were fixed during its original release, that fix is fine with me. Hey, who here just loves all the "fixes" to Star Wars? In any event, if one wants to do a film over, that's called a remake.

 

[Ernest Rister]

LOL Robert, perhaps.

Seriously, though, this is the best way I can describe it.

Let's say the title card was hanging in a gallery and you were front lighting it with a 6"x9" lighting instrument. A light instrument will cast an oblong or round shape, and so you use the frame levers on the top, bottom, left, and right of the instrument to "cut" the light into a square shape, and by being precise, you can cut the light into a precise square that frames the card. Now you have a hard-edged square shaped beam of light on the title card with the edges of the card in complete shadow. Next, you loosen the barrel of the instrument and pull the lens away from the lamp, diffusing the shape of the "square", removing the hard-edge look of the light.

That's what the Bambi title cards looked like. Square lighting "diffusion" at the top, bottom, right and left of the cards. It is not "window box" per se, it is sort of a window box effect, creating a diffused shadow border - please forgive me my choice of words, this is difficult for me to describe.

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's book, Walt Disney's Bambi: The Story and the Film has a picture of the main title card (Bambi) on the very first page, and the "diffusion" lighting effect creating a shadowed border around the card is there. For the 1997 version, the image was magnified to make the credits larger, removing the lovely diffusion effect. Since parts of the title cards extended into the diffusion areas, these (albeit very minor) areas of the original image were cropped out, too.

Hope this helps, I'll try to hunt down screengrabs in the meantime.

 

[rich_d]

I also think there is and should be no hard line.

It is easy to say film is art and once put out for public display should be left untouched.

But unlike art hung on a wall, film is more a collaboration. If a director believes that if only for the lack of a larger budget he would have made a far superior film should he not be allowed to try to improve it?

Should someone be allowed to take Sam Fuller's The Big Red One and "restore" 45 minutes of footage to the film even if it was never released that way?

What about a director who says that the original release of his film is the definitive edition and one that he is fully happy with .... yet still puts out a modified version ... should we look down our noses at him?

I don't believe in a hardline approach but believe in most cases filmmakers would be far better off working on new films than spending time tinkering with old ones.

 

[Patrick McCart]

I think that's beyond extreme. Airplane! was screened with two reels out of order in the original preview. Does this mean we should repect the print error by keeping the reels switched?

 

[Lars Vermundsberget]

I would prefer an unaltered version - just restored.

However, I think the decision to fix obvious mistakes is fully acceptable.

 

[Jay Pennington]

That wouldn't fall under my (personal, subjective) definition. That's a projectionist mistake, not the original state of the negative.

 

[Ernest Rister]

"Robert, Ernest, THANKS for great commentary and history!!"

Don't thank me, I'm just carrying the water. Thank Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston for writing their detailed history on the making of Bambi. We all lost Frank last year, and with his passing went decades of knowledge.

 

[oscar_merkx]

I am really impressed with both Ernest & RAH regarding the history of Bambi

A must buy really

Where can I find this book you are quoting from Ernest ?

 

[Ernest Rister]

I bought the book - fittingly enough - at Disneyland, in 1992.

The name of the book is "Walt Disney's Bambi: The Story and the Film"

The authors are: Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston
It was published in 1990 by:
Stewart, Tabori & Chang, Inc.
575 Broadway, New York, New York, 10012

The dedication reads:

"We dedicate this book to Walt Disney who asked for it fifty years ago.
"I'd like to see a book -- an edition of Bambi -- put out afterwards, and I'd just like to see the text all broken up with these sketches."
-- Walt Disney, Story meeting notes, December 12, 1939
Sorry, Walt -- you always said we were slow."

 

[Craig Beam]

Sadly, the book is now out of print.... but one can certainly obtain it, if money isn't an issue. It can be found for around $100 used, considerably more for a mint copy still in its shrinkwrap. It should also be noted that a Bambi flip book was included with the book, and is frequently missing from used copies. I went searching online last night for the cheapest edition I could find, and was dismayed at the prices the book commands... dismayed, that is, until I checked the website for my local library... jackpot! It's checked out right now, but I'm next in line!

 

[Ernest Rister]

I've got both -- the flip book is an idea carried over from the legendary Thomas and Johnston tome, "Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life" -- a book I saw at many CGI artists' workstations at Sony ImageWorks when I crewed the miniature unit on Starship Troopers. The seminal "Illusion of Life" features choice frames of clean-up character animation in the top right of the pages, animation which can be experienced by flipping the pages.

For this follow-up, the animation was ported over to a secondary flip book, probably to prevent damage to the main tome.

The small Bambi "flip-book" includes four moments, encapsulated within 46 pages, and this is how they are described:

From Right-to-Left

* Thumper is convulsed with the riotous laughter of a child (Frank Thomas)

* Friend Owl demonstrates what it means to be twitterpated (Eric Larson)

From Left-to-Right:

* Bambi has trouble keeping his long, spindly legs pointed in the right direction (Ollie Johnston)

* Bambi shows great anxiety in his tense attitude and quick, daring moves (Milt Kahl)

 

[oscar_merkx]

Thanks for the quick responses. I will try to hunt down a copy

 

[ZackR]

Ernest,

Here are some images that might be helpful. Not sure if they are what you are looking for or not though...

 

[Ernest Rister]

BINGO!

(dances the dance of validation...trips on shoelace...steps on cat...falls down stairs...)

 

[Jay Pennington]

Hmm. See how at the corners the gradient isn't there? That's an artifact of the soft edge being made in the video realm. It looks like it's simply a soft matte made to help hide the fact that they had to windowbox the titles so they wouldn't fall into overscan.

Now since you say there are stills in the Bambi book of this, and I would hope they're from an actual print and not some home video master, this is perplexing.

A used book store near me had this book last time I checked (although that was ages ago). Much less than $100, too. I think it's the only Thomas/Johnston book I don't have, so I'll check on Monday.

 

[Ernest Rister]

Now since you say there are stills in the Bambi book of this, and I would hope they're from an actual print and not some home video master, this is perplexing.

Look, I'm sorry -- This is getting even more confused than I intended, and its my fault for my inability to describe fully what I'm talking about. I'm not speaking of the giant massive black border, I'm talking about the "gradient", as you say, creating that lovely shadow-border effect, as if a lighting instrument were lighting the card with the edges slowly "fading out". The main title card in the book has a "shadow border", but is round, not square.

Now this is where things get weird:

The image in the book has the "gradient" effect I'm speaking of, but it is more oval shaped and rounded at the edges, not as square as seen in the screen grab. The opening title card seen in the book also shows *more* of the actual card than seen in the screen grab above. In the screen grab above, the sides of the card are actually obscured - not shrunk or minimized - by the large black border seen in the screen grab. You see the entire flower at the bottom center of the frame in the example in the book, and as you can see in the screen grab above, this is croppped and obscured (actually very much so, if you have the actual picture to compare it to).

If the image was decreased to allow for overscan, why did they actually crop the image to do it? For symmetry reason perhaps? Or is the image in the book production artwork, not an actual frame reproduction?

Anyway, as I said many posts back, this is a small thing and I don't want to make too big deal out of it, especially since I don't have the new DVD to compare it to. I also don't have the 1997 version handy at the moment, and haven't watched that version since 1998 or so. If the new DVD looks like the image here in the book, then I have no complaints.

 

[Jay Pennington]

Okay, that makes sense. Perhaps for that video release they were working with a transfer that was nowhere near full aperture, and thus had credits spilling into overscan area and had to shrink it back, adding a fake soft border in a ham-handed attempt to duplicate the look of the proper framing.

I just checked the '97 LD and the video border is gone but without windowboxing most of the true gradient falls outside the viewable area, alas.

 

[Brandon Conway]

You know, I wonder if it's just a matter of overscan...