News|Movies|BD & DVD|Writings|Other

Thursday, October 14, 2010

BD impressions: Beauty and the Beast

4:49 PM / BD Impressions / 3 Comments

It's interesting but not altogether surprising that, whenever people discuss Disney's animation renaissance, the impression is often given that BEAUTY AND THE BEAST immediately followed THE LITTLE MERMAID, credited with having launched the studio's "second golden age". THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER lies sandwiched in between them - a bizarre anomaly in the studio's "classics" roster and the sort of title that, a decade later, would have been cranked out by the TV animation division and relegated to the direct to video market. I mention this because there's such a huge gulf between MERMAID and BEAST in terms of the crew's self-assurance (good as MERMAID is, it feels a lot more tentative and less consistent, both in terms of tone and production values) that it does well to remember that they didn't go straight from one to the other.

In terms of this particularly lauded period in Disney's history, ALADDIN gets my vote for the best all-round offering (I think THE LION KING is a tad overrated and find POCAHONTAS too po-faced and self-important to get much enjoyment out of it), but BEAST comes a close second. It manages to offer a bit of everything without the uncomfortable lurches in tone that would plague POCAHONTAS (which I've always suspected was commissioned in an unsuccessful attempt to bag the Oscar BEAST failed to win), and while the quality of the animation is a bit inconsistent (it would take until ALADDIN for this still somewhat inexperienced second generation of artists to deliver a REALLY polished product), it's very easy to overlook the odd bit of clumsiness in a film this entertaining. I still don't think the second golden age ever hit the heights of Disney animation in Walt's time, but as far as the studio's 90s takes on the "princess" formula are concerned, this is definitely as good as it gets.

Image quality: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST was the second feature film to be composited digitally using Disney's now-defunct CAPS system (the first was THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER, which I suspect was created primarily to road-test the technology). As such, none if it ever touched film (barring, oddly enough, the closing credits for the theatrical cut, which for this release are taken from a print source), so the overzealous grain-scrubbing that went on with previous Disney "Diamond Edition" releases is not an issue here. There's no grain because there never was any to begin with.

This is, on the whole, a striking-looking image, with plenty of detail and excellent compression throughout. Colours are somewhat more saturated than the earlier DVD releases, and I suspect that some artificial boosting may have been applied: on a handful of occasions, certain hues look perfectly natural during fades between scenes but suddenly "pop" to a more vibrant shade as soon as the fade ends (watch the orange leaves at the bottom of the screen at 00:11:15). I'm not going to say that it looks WRONG per se, but it definitely looks different from previous incarnations of the film, and anomalies like the one noted do make me suspect that some naughtiness is going on. (Xylon's comparison at the AVS Forum gives a good demonstration of the saturation difference between this and the previous DVD.)

A number of shots also appear to suffer from slight over-sharpening (see Example 12), while a couple of others appear to have precisely the opposite problem: filtering (see Example 7). Additionally, a couple of shots also suffer from a strange stippling effect on the characters' outlines (see Example 19). I suspect that these are not problems with the BD as such but rather issues with how the art was manipulated in the CAPS system. As such, it means that the image isn't quite as striking as the more recent THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG (the only other digitally composited 2D Disney feature released on BD thus far)... but it's still a mighty fine-looking disc. 9/10

Beauty and the Beast
studio: Buena Vista; country: USA; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 21.4 GB (theatrical cut), 22.9 GB (special edition);
average bit rate (including audio): 36.18 Mbit/sec (theatrical cut), 35.75 Mbit/sec (special edition)

3 Comments

 
To combat spam, commenting is automatically disabled on entries older than 30 days.

Did a comment you tried to post accidentally get eaten by the spam filter? It happens from time to time. I get upwards of 200 spam comments every day and unfortunately don't have the time to weed through all of them in case something genuine ended up there by mistake. If one of your posts gets incorrectly flagged as spam, email me at m.r.mackenzie[at]gmail[dot]com and I'll do my best to retrieve it.