Tag Archives: Animation

Cat City (Deaf Crocodile)

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There’s typical frozen temporal cloning. The bigger problem is that there are about 100 freeze frames. Some have negligible clone repairs, but usually the picture simply freezes.

Frozen picture. Yellow number indicates frame number.
Picture is mostly frozen, with some misaligned cloning.

The shorts got worse processing, especially at splices.

Let Us Get a Dog (1974)

Freeze frame:

Interpolation:

Frozen cloning, screen tearing, misalignment:

Can you spot it?

Where is the Limit? (1975)

Frozen cloning:

Screen tearing:

Interpolation:

This interpolated frame includes a microloop.

Restoration processing by Hungary National Film Institute Filmlab.

Samm Deighan’s irritating uptalk-filled commentary approaches the movie with the assumption that animation is for children. It sounds like a dry book-report academic lecture, instead of someone who is an expert in Hungarian cinema. Skip it.

Benny’s Bathtub (Deaf Crocodile)

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Deaf Crocodile’s BD of Benny’s Bathtub (1971) does not have a proper subtitle track, only closed captioning:

Typos:

Poor placement:

Additionally, the timing is poor. Lines appear too early, stay too long, and overlap dialog. All this makes following the movie very difficult.

The included episodes of Cirkleen suffer from the same subtitle problems.

Video quality, though, is very nice.

The Little Mermaid (1989)

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Yesterday, the Academy Museum ran an original print of The Little Mermaid (1989). A very rare treat. I think the last time it ran in 35mm in Los Angeles was about 20 years ago at LACMA.

A few things struck me. It is VERY grainy and much of the movie has a haze over it, sometimes quite strong. Even the end credits—the blue lettering bloomed into the black.

Most surprising to me was that Ariel’s hair is red-orange, not red. It had been so long since I last saw the movie that I had come to think it was red.

There’s a nice comparison here, comparing the new UHD to the previous BD. In every instance, the UHD color is too saturated and seriously goosed. The BD more closely looks like the print I just saw. The colors were vibrant for the time, but duller than we’re used to seeing nowadays.