Comment by hekkle 13 hours ago
I'm surprised they can't just put a filter on the digital versions to achieve a similar look and feel to the 35mm version.
It is clear that the animators factored in the colour changes from the original media to 35mm, so it seems a disservice to them to re-release their works without honouring how they intended the films to be seen.
Disney 100% has access to colorists and best in class colour grading software. It must have been a business (cost cutting) decision?
I’m reminded of the beginning of the movie Elf, where the book publisher is informed that a printing error means their latest book is missing the final two pages. Should they pulp and reprint? He says,
> You think a kid is going to notice two pages? All they do is look at the pictures.
I’m quite sure bean counters look at Disney kids movies the exact same way, despite them being Disney’s bread and butter.
With Star Wars you have a dedicated adult fan base that’ll buy up remasters and reworkings. Aladdin? Not so much. Especially in the streaming era, no one is even buying any individual movie any more.
I'm a 39 year old man who ground his VHS of Aladdin to dust in the 90s, and bought the Blu Ray because I can't say I can rely on streaming to always exist.
> With Star Wars you have a dedicated adult fan base that’ll buy up remasters and reworkings. Aladdin? Not so much. Especially in the streaming era, no one is even buying any individual movie any more.
I agree it was likely Disney being cheap, but there are tons of people who'll buy up disney movies on physical media in the age of streaming. Not only are there disney fans who'd rival the obsessiveness of star wars fans, but like Lucas Disney just can't leave shit alone. They go back and censor stuff all the time and you can't get the uncensored versions on their streaming platform. Aladdin is even an example where they've made changes. It's not even a new thing for Disney. The lyrics to one of the songs in Aladdin were changed long before Disney+ existed.
Steve Jobs' type attitude vs Bill Gates type attitude (in the 90s). Or, Apple vs Microsoft.
The Disney of yesterday might have been a bit more Jobs than Gates, compared to the Disney of today.
They care very deeply about this and devoted a lot of resources to (re)grading the digital versions that you see today on Disney+. The versions you see are intentional and not the result of cost cutting. (I was not directly privy to this work but I worked on Disney+ before its launch and I sat in on some tech talks and other internal information about the digital workflows that led to the final result on the small screen and there was a lot of attention on this at the time)
I think there's a discussion to be had about art, perception and devotion to the "original" or "authentic" version of something that can't be resolved completely but what I don't think is correct is the perception that this was overlooked or a mistake.
The vast majority of people will not care nor even notice. Some people will notice and say, hey, why is it "blurry." So do you spend a good chunk of time and money to make it look accurate or do you just dump the file onto the server and call it a day?
To speak nothing of the global audience for these films. I'm guessing most people's first experience seeing these movies was off a VHS or DVD, so the nostalgia factor is only relevant to small percentage of viewers, and only a small percentage of that percentage notices.
How can we get away from this mindset as a society, where craft and art are sacrificed at the altar of "it's not monetarily worth it."
There's a fucking lot of things that are not worth it monetarily, but worth it for the sake of itself. Because it's a nice gesture. Or because it just makes people happy. Not to sound like some hippie idealist, but it's just so frustrating that everything has to be commoditized.
And ultimately, what you need to achieve acceptable CRT effects is resolution. Only now, with 4K and above, can we start to portray the complex interactions between the electron beam and the produced image by your console. But the colour banding that caused the hearts of The Legend of Zelda to show a golden sheen is still unreachable.
Reminded me of this article about some retro games on crt vs lcd-
https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-tvs-a...
You can, that's what Pixar did while creating the film. From the article:
> During production, we’re working mostly from computer monitors. We’re rarely seeing the images on film. So, we have five or six extremely high-resolution monitors that have better color and picture quality. We put those in general work areas, so people can go and see how their work looks. Then, when we record, we try to calibrate to the film stock, so the image we have on the monitor looks the same as what we’ll get on film.
But they didn't do a perfect job (the behavior of film is extremely complex), so there's a question- should the digital release reflect their intention as they were targeting these calibrated monitors or should it reflect what was actually released? Also, this wouldn't include other artifacts like film grain.
> Then, when we record, we try to calibrate to the film stock, so the image we have on the monitor
Except, as they say, the high grade monitors were calibrated to emulate the characteristics of film.
If we can show that D+ doesn't look like the film, then we can point out that it probably doesn't look like the calibrated monitors either. Those army men are not that shade of slime green in real life, and you'll have a hard time convincing me that after all the thought and effort went in to the animation they allowed that putrid pea shade to go through.
The best option for me would be to release it in whatever format preserves the most of the original colour data without modification, then let the viewer application apply colour grading. Give me the raw renders in a linear 16bpc colour space with no changes. Sadly, I don't think we have digital movie formats that can handle that.
It is doable and you can get presets designed to mimic the look of legendary photography film stock like Velvia. But what they did back then was very much an analog process and thus also inherently unstable. Small details start to matter in terms of exposure times, projectors used etc. There’s so many frames and it took so much time, that it’s almost guaranteed there’d be noticeable differences due to process fluctuations.
It's not just about slapping on some grain and calling it a day; it's about honoring a whole set of artistic decisions that were made with that specific medium in mind
They could, but it would require some work to get it right. This is very similar to conversations that happen regularly in the retro game scene regarding CRT monitors vs modern monitors for games of a certain era. The analog process was absolutely factored in when the art was being made, so if you want a similar visuals on a modern screen you will need some level of thoughtful post processing.