The Violent Years (AGFA)

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Excellent video with minimal, if any extra processing. Clear, sharp, and natural grain.

Clipped directly from the BD.

The source is the camera negative, which has many instances of missing single frames. The splicing is clean and seamless, but without the dirt or jump in the gate that cement or tape would cause, it tended to look like my TV was dropping frames. If that’s how the film is, then that’s how it is. The benefit to having a dirty splice at a missing frame, though, is that I don’t begin to wonder if my gear is messing up. Still, I far prefer this over some hack technician who interpolates missing frames.

Anatomy of a Psycho

Overall, Anatomy of a Psycho looks just as good, but the stabilization is broken.

Notice how the picture rotates. The center is stable, but the rest of the picture rotates about it. That shouldn’t happen.

Heroic Times (Deaf Crocodile)

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Picture is very good…

Clipped directly from the BD.

…but they really need to proofread their subtitles! This movie has lots of typos.

Skip Samm Deighan’s superficial commentary. She approaches Heroic Times from the viewpoint that animation is only for kids. Now, before you correct me by saying that she defends animation as not only for kids, the fact that she constantly brings it up is, in fact, surrendering to the idea that animation is kid stuff. Her commentary is filled with filler: “I wanna talk about…,” “…as I said…,” “…I will talk about later…” And then there’s her maddening uptalk.

Processed by National Film Institute Hungary.

The Tragedy of Man (Deaf Crocodile)

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The Tragedy of Man (2011) is a movie that absolutely needs to be dubbed. Gorgeous animation, but the constant dialog means that my eyes are always at the bottom of the screen.

Add to that, impenetrable King James-style dialog:

Dialog is flying by while everything onscreen is moving, flashing, or doing some interesting thing. Add in this stilted olde English, and it’s impossible to keep up.

When movies were subtitled in the nitrate era, not every line got translated. I’ve seen prints where a single line covers entire scenes. We should return to that.

Then there’s the ridiculous vocabulary:

You can do pretentious writing in a spoken translation. That is, in a dub. It’s unreadable when put into subtitles.

And speaking of unreadable:

Give me a fucking break.

DUB MOVIES IN THE LANGUAGE OF THE AUDIENCE.

And an error that should’ve been caught: