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Friday, February 18, 2011

BD impressions: Alice in Wonderland

9:42 PM / BD Impressions / 3 Comments

The film: Disney went through a period of making some very meandering, largely inconsequential films with minimal plotting, and ALICE IN WONDERLAND is probably both the best and most obvious example of this trend. It uses the same "It was all a dream!" structure as THE WIZARD OF OZ, but this doesn't feel like much of a cheat as it's blatantly obvious from the outset that this is what's going on. Also, whereas later films in this vein like THE JUNGLE BOOK and the interminably uneventful THE ARISTOCATS had a tendency to drag in places, the various set-pieces in ALICE IN WONDERLAND are all so good that clock-watching doesn't become an issue. Alice herself is as bland and pedantic a Disney heroine as you could hope to meet, so it's up to the colourful array of characters she meets to give the film its personality. While the Cheshire Cat, Mad Hatter and Red Queen are justly remembered with great fondness, my favourite segment is actually the Walrus and the Carpenter, a delightfully stupid little instalment based around an absurdly catchy ditty.

It may not look particularly substantial compared to something like LADY AND THE TRAMP (probably my favourite of Disney's output from the latter half of the golden age) or THE LION KING (good, but in my opinion overrated), ALICE IN WONDERLAND has a simple charm that's hard to resist. It's also delightfully fucked up in a way that few Disney movies are, at least to such an overt extent. Which can only be a good thing. 8/10

Image quality: I continue to be fascinated and grudgingly impressed by Disney's ability to completely alter the look of their films to the extent that they no longer look like... well, film. ALICE IN WONDERLAND was of course shot on 35mm, but you'd think the master for this BD was created by digitising the original cels (it wasn't, in case you're wondering). Grain is completely removed and looks like it was never there to begin with. The purist in me hates this revisionist approach and everything it stands for, but at the same time I must admit that there's something quite stunning about the results. I can only assume that the source was an extremely fine grain print. Artefacts are for the most part non-existent, though some mild to moderate artefacts do occasionally crop up (see Example 2 and Example 15). It's the best-looking of these Disney "revisionist restorations" so far, which to a certain extent is damning it with faint praise as I'd much rather these films were simply presented as they were originally shot, but the realist in me accepts that this isn't going to happen until Disney has a profound change of attitude about the presentation of its catalogue titles. 8/10

Alice in Wonderland
studio: Buena Vista; country: USA; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 1.33:1

3 Comments

 
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