Comment by yCombLinks
Comment by yCombLinks 11 hours ago
The texture of the film grain makes Mulan and Aladdin really look better. The large simple filled sections look like they have so much more to them.
Comment by yCombLinks 11 hours ago
The texture of the film grain makes Mulan and Aladdin really look better. The large simple filled sections look like they have so much more to them.
I'm not sure if I'm just young enough to be on the other side of this despite seeing all three of those Disney movies as a millennial kid (Lion King and Aladdin were VHS mainstays in my house, and I remember seeing Mulan in theaters), but I honestly don't find the film grain to look better at all and think all three of those bottom images are much more appealing. For the Toy Story ones, I think I'm mostly indifferent; I can see why some people might prefer the upper film images but don't really think I'd notice which one I was watching. I'd definitely think I'd notice the difference in the 2D animation though and would find the film grain extremely distracting.
To me it's much worse. You can't see all of the detail the artists drew, and there is noise everywhere, even specs of dust.catches. Whenever I watch a film based movie my immersion always gets broken by all the little specs that show up. Digital is a much more immersive experience for me.
> To me it's much worse. You can't see all of the detail the artists drew, and there is noise everywhere, even specs of dust.catches.
In the lion king example you weren't meant to see all of the detail the artists drew. In the Army men example the color on the digital version is nothing like the color of the actual toys.
They originally made those movies the way they did intentionally because what they wanted wasn't crystal clear images with unrealistic colors, they wanted atmosphere and for things to look realistic.
Film grain and dust can be excessive and distracting. It's a good thing when artifacts added due to dirt/age gets cleaned up for transfers so we can have clear images, but the result of that clean up should still show what the artists originally intended and that's where disney's digital versions really miss the mark.
This is an interesting take when you look at the gas station Toy Story example and consider the night sky. In the digital version the stars are very washed out but in the film version the sky is dark and it's easy to appreciate the stars. Perhaps it's unrealistic when you realize the setting is beneath a gas station canopy with fluorescent lights, but that detail, along with some of the very distinct coloring, stuck out to me.
Which is of course highly subjective; you could argue that film grain is an unwanted but unavoidable side-effect from the medium used, just like other artifacts from film - vertical alignment issues, colour shifting from "film breath", 24 frames per second, or the weird sped-up look from really old films.
I don't believe these were part of the filmmaker's vision at the time, but unavoidable. Nowadays they are added again to films (and video games) on purpose to create a certain (nostalgic) effect.
The one frame they showed from the Lion King really stood out. The difference in how the background animals were washed out by the sunlight makes the film version look significantly better.