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Sunday, October 18, 2009

BD impressions: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

2:10 PM / BD Impressions / 8 Comments

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is, of course, Disney's first and the first North American animated feature (although not, as it happens, the first animated feature, despite more than seventy years of misinformation) - "the one that started it all", as the saying goes. It's incredibly highly regarded, even by those who generally look down their noses at animation, and yet I can't help feeling that its merit is largely statistical. Yes, it's a significant film, but it's far from Disney's best. The 1930s and 40s were a period of extremely rapid development for the medium of animation (no other art form in history grew so much in such a short space of time), and you only have to look at their next film, Pinocchio, to see how much they improved in every respect - from animation to characterisation to the fundamentals of good storytelling - in the space of three years. Snow White has some extremely impressive moments - Snow White's horror-filled dash through the forest and the Queen's transformation being particular highlights - but for the most part it drags, with the characters either bland (Snow White) or obvious (the dwarfs, each of whom has a single personality trait summed up by their name), and the animators spending way too long indulging in sight gags that really aren't all that funny. I wouldn't expect the studio's first attempt at a full length feature to be a masterpiece, so I'm content to appreciate it for what it is: a vital stepping stone on the path to greatness.

Image quality: More or less what I expected. As with all the HD masters they have created since Alice in Wonderland (for the 2004 Masterpiece Edition DVD release), Disney have gone down the "let's pretend this film was never shot on film" route and delivered an image that has been subjected to a heavy amount of digital manipulation and is therefore no longer an accurate representation of what audiences saw in theatres back in 1937. The arguments for and against this sort of revisionism have been heard countless times already, and I'm not going to waste yet more bandwidth regurgitating them, so instead I'll simply say that is what it is, and you'll either like how it looks or you won't.

Detail varies wildly on a shot by shot basis, but I'm inclined to think that this is the result of the photography itself rather than the transfer. Some shots (e.g. Example 5) were clearly out of focus when they were originally shot, and there's nothing that can be done about them. On other occasions, the image looks exceedingly crisp (e.g. Example 3), but most of the time it falls somewhere in between the two extremes. Unfortunately, whether or not you feel that the grain reduction is a betrayal of the film's original look, it can't be denied that the process has, in places, caused noticeable damage: Example 8, for instance, shows that the process has played havoc with the character outlines, resulting in a smudgy, blocky appearance that also affected the BD of Sleeping Beauty to a degree. (On the other hand, I don't recall coming across anything like this in Pinocchio.) For purists like myself, the handful of instances in which the natural grain texture manages to slip through (e.g. Example 2) offer a tantalising and extremely frustrating glimpse at what might have been.

Compression is well-handled for the most part, but the rainstorm at the film's climax is a shitstorm of compression artefacts, which I'm sorry to say includes some of the worst macroblocking I've seen on a BD title. See Example 17 for a particularly noxious instance.

Overall, this release is a bit of a mixed bag. Disney have attempted to make a film from 1937 look like it was shot in 2009, and while what they've actually managed to achieve is impressive, there's a limit to what you can do with material of this vintage before you begin to damage it. Ironically, had the restoration team been less overzealous in their treatment of the film, it would probably have looked more cohesive and impressive as a whole. I find myself wishing, not for the first time, that Disney would take a more cautious approach to their restorations, allowing the material to show its age, so to speak, rather than attempting to make it into something it isn't. If anyone has the BD or HD DVD of The Adventures of Robin Hood, they should take a look at the bonus Looney Tunes cartoons, Rabbit Hood and Katnip Kollege especially, for an example of how to make vintage animation shine in HD while still retaining the characteristics of film. 7/10

PS. Rather irritatingly, the opening titles are windowboxed, a process that really should be done away with in the age of high definition and overscan-free displays.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
studio: Buena Vista; country: USA; region code: A; codec: AVC;
file size: 18.3 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 31.61 Mbit/sec

8 Comments

 
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