Comment by Torn
3 months ago
Disney 100% has access to colorists and best in class colour grading software. It must have been a business (cost cutting) decision?
3 months ago
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.
VHS resolution is total crap... yet: it's not uncommon for the colors and contrast on VHS (and some early DVD) to be much better than what is available for streaming today.
This is totally bonkers, because the VHS format is crippled, also color wise. Many modern transfers are just crap.
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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.
It’s really been the driving force of modern life for centuries at this point.
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> 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."
Honestly, by weakening copyright protections. People who love the works will do the work to protect them when they don't have to fear being sued into bankruptcy for trying to preserve their own culture.
You can sit down and recolor the movie frame by frame and release it on torrent yourself, it'll make many people happy. It won't be worth it monetarily but since you're annoyed it doesn't exist and money isn't a factor...
It's always easy to complain about others not being generous enough with their time, but we always have an excuse for why we won't do it ourselves.
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Just dialing down the red and blue channels a bit makes it much closer for several of the early '90s releases (look at that Aladdin example from TFA)
Disney do pay for industry leading colorists. They chose to favour a more saturated look for Aladdin et al. It is reasonable to prefer either. I can't imaging what happened to the greens in the Toy Story examples if they are accurate.
They could reduce the saturation with 1 mouse click if they wanted, but they didn't. They must have intentionally decided that high saturation is desirable.