Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, Blu-ray (1939/2009)

by | Mar 15, 2009 | DVD & Blu-ray Video Reviews | 0 comments

Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, Blu-ray (1939/2009)

70th Anniversary 2-Disc Platinum Edition (+ 3rd standard DVD)
Studio: Disney 100057 [Release Date: Mar. 10, 09]
Video: 4:3 color with 16:9 option (“Disney View”), 1080pHD
Audio: English 7.1 HDS-HD Master Audio, Restored original theatrical mono soundtrack, DD 5.1 on DVD
Subtitles: English SDH (also French & Spanish on extras)
Extras: Bonus DVD version, Deleted scenes, Alternate ending, Cine-Explore experience, Pinocchio trivia, Pleasure Island carnival games, Pinocchio puzzles, “The Making of Pinocchio,” Audio commentary rack with Leonard Maltin, Eric Goldberg & J. B. Kaufman; “Geppettos Then and Now,”  Music videos,  Song excerpts only, BD Live (with Internet connection)
Length: 88 minutes
Rating: *****

The transfer of the classic Disney animation features to Blu-ray continues, and this latest entry from the Disney vaults is really special – to my mind much better than the previous effort: Sleeping Beauty.  This masterpiece of animation got the world Wishing Upon a Star (the music won an Oscar at the time), and as the excellent featurette points out, made a giant leap in sophistication artistically from the original black & white Silly Symphonies and other early  Disney animation. Everything in Pinocchio was carefully planned by artists with a very refine camera eye.  Walt was heavily into storyboards and slide shows of elements for the films, and he even shot actors in costumes imitating the motions of the film’s characters such as Jimmy Cricket so that the silent film footage could be projected on a rear screen to sync up with animators’ drawings.  It was not exactly rotoscoping, but a step toward trying to achieve a more natural, human flow of motion than any animation had had up to that time. A second featurette discusses “The Sweat Box,” which was the small projector room in which Walt would watch the latest work of the animators and hash it over to come up with the rich animated world he directed.

The story of Geppetto’s beloved wooden puppet’s quest to become a real boy, guided by his conscience Jimmy Cricket has enthralled children and families for 70 years and now it has a brand new life in this glorious digital restoration. I had forgotten how impressive some of the animation is artistically – for example the Monstro giant whale sequence, in which the waves are done in the style of Japanese ukioye graphics.  This truly is a wonderful family adventure story which dips here and there into Disney’s “dark side,” and the amazing thing about it is how little of it seems dated – as most films from the 1930s naturally would be expected to.

Nearly a page of the promotional sheets was devoted to “Disney View,” which turns out to be simply some dark borders specially painted to fill some of the pillar-boxing on the sides of the original 1.33:1 ratio screen, filling in the sides for 16:9 ratio displays – as many TV stations are now doing on some of their 4:3 programs. It took some effort to navigate to the Disney View and I found on many scenes it was so dark as to be nearly invisible, but at least it wasn’t distracting as the bright blue vertical bars emblazoned with call letters telecast by some stations.  While I’m grumping, let me castigate Disney for forcing viewers to trudge thru a half dozen or more previews before you get to the film in question; they seem to be worse on that count than other studios.  Perhaps when I move to a later-gen Blu-ray player I will have an easier and faster option to skip such preview onslaughts.

 – John Sunier

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