Tag Archives: Deaf Crocodile

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 Time Bending Mysteries of Shahram Mokri (Deaf Crocodile)

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Click here for the first movie in the set.

Fish & Cat (2013)

For a 2013 movie, I expected this to look better. My guess is an inadequate camera. Look at that aliasing!

Clipped directly from the BD.

The running time is 141 minutes, not the 134 stated on the box.

Invasion (2017)

The first movie in the set that looks good.

Clipped directly from the BD.

However, the subtitles are horrible. There are typos throughout the set, but those for Invasion are the worst.

Later spelled “Daniel.”
Plus inconsistent placement of quotation marks.

Careless Crime (2020)

Another nice transfer.

Clipped directly from the BD.

These are probably fascinating in Farsi, but I was bored, and not having any of it by the time I got to Careless Crime. All the walking, monotonous dialog, and reading was just too taxing. I would be very interested to see Invasion, maybe even Fish & Cat, dubbed in English.

Ashkan, the Charmed Ring and Other Stories (Deaf Crocodile)

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[Ashkan] was shot on video at 25 frames per second. [This version was converted to 24fps] by removing 1 frame per second from the movie.

I initially misread that as “one frame per shot,” which would have been no big deal. So, to see such choppiness really caught me off guard:

Clipped directly from the BD.

It’s really noticeable and distracting throughout the movie, though the hand-held shaky cam helped hide some of it.

If this is the best version, I have some questions. Why couldn’t the 25fps original be used? Does it still exist? The video that remains is basically slowed down; slowing the original down to 24fps would be effectively the same. Why couldn’t it be a 25fps->1080i60 conversion? What about the sound? Is it slowed or pitch-corrected?

I’m not thrilled with the video compression, but it could be worse:

Clipped directly from the BD.

A poor presentation. Whatever the price is for this four-disc set, it’s 25% too much.