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The 'Toy Story' You Remember

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#41

Post by qingcharles »

behringer wrote: post #16
timenotwasted wrote: post #10

This makes so much more sense now. After having kids I've been watching my fair share of Pixar and I just never recalled how flat and bland everything looked but I would always chalk it up to my brain not recalling how it looked at the time. Good to know I guess that it wasn't just entirely nostalgia but sad that we continue to lose some of this history and so soon.

Things like this are being preserved, you just have to sail the high seas.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. What you're hinting at is that a lot of original 35mms are now getting scanned and uploaded privately, especially where all the commercial releases on Blu-ray and streaming are based on modified versions of the original movies, or over-restored versions.

These can be especially hard to find as the files are typically enormous, with low compression to keep things like grain. I see them mostly traded on short-lived gdrives and Telegram.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#42

Post by charcircuit »

kemayo wrote: post #7
yCombLinks wrote: post #4

The texture of the film grain makes Mulan and Aladdin really look better. The large simple filled sections look like they have so much more to them.

The one frame they showed from the Lion King really stood out. The difference in how the background animals were washed out by the sunlight makes the film version look significantly better.

To me it's much worse. You can't see all of the detail the artists drew, and there is noise everywhere, even specs of dust.catches. Whenever I watch a film based movie my immersion always gets broken by all the little specs that show up. Digital is a much more immersive experience for me.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#43

Post by belZaah »

hekkle wrote: post #6

I'm surprised they can't just put a filter on the digital versions to achieve a similar look and feel to the 35mm version. It is clear that the animators factored in the colour changes from the original media to 35mm, so it seems a disservice to them to re-release their works without honouring how they intended the films to be seen.

It is doable and you can get presets designed to mimic the look of legendary photography film stock like Velvia. But what they did back then was very much an analog process and thus also inherently unstable. Small details start to matter in terms of exposure times, projectors used etc. There’s so many frames and it took so much time, that it’s almost guaranteed there’d be noticeable differences due to process fluctuations.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#45

Post by dclowd9901 »

etempleton wrote: post #28
Torn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disney 100% has access to colorists and best in class colour grading software. It must have been a business (cost cutting) decision?

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?

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.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#46

Post by redwall_hp »

MangoToupe wrote: post #39
bpiroman wrote: post #38

wtf happened to Simpsons on Disney+? looks like it's zoomed in.

The simpsons was originally made in 4:3. Many people don't like watching with large black bars to the right and left, so they show a cropped 16:9 version. People complained because this is occasionally a problem and ruins a joke, so I believe you can opt into either.

A similar crime against taste as the pan-and-scan "fullscreen" DVDs of the early 2000s. If I want to pay to watch something, don't crop out a chunk of what the cinematographer wanted me to see...

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#47

Post by squigz »

qingcharles wrote: post #41
behringer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like this are being preserved, you just have to sail the high seas.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. What you're hinting at is that a lot of original 35mms are now getting scanned and uploaded privately, especially where all the commercial releases on Blu-ray and streaming are based on modified versions of the original movies, or over-restored versions. These can be especially hard to find as the files are typically enormous, with low compression to keep things like grain.…

> I see them mostly traded on short-lived gdrives and Telegram.

Someone tell this community to share over BT. Aint nobody got time to keep up with which platform/server everyone is on and which links are expired and yuck.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#48

Post by opello »

charcircuit wrote: post #40

>Computer chips were not fast enough, nor disks large enough, nor compression sophisticated enough to display even 30 minutes of standard-definition motion pictures. This is not true at all. Being compatible with outdated, film based projectors was much more important for being able to show it in as many theaters as possible. If they wanted to do a digital screening it would have been technologically possible.

I bumped on this too, since 1994-1995 was about the time when multi-gigabyte hard drives were readily available and multiple full motion video codecs were being used in games, albeit for cut scenes. Theater projector compatibility makes complete sense.

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#49

Post by diogenescynic »

behringer wrote: post #16
timenotwasted wrote: post #10

This makes so much more sense now. After having kids I've been watching my fair share of Pixar and I just never recalled how flat and bland everything looked but I would always chalk it up to my brain not recalling how it looked at the time. Good to know I guess that it wasn't just entirely nostalgia but sad that we continue to lose some of this history and so soon.

Things like this are being preserved, you just have to sail the high seas.

You can’t trust corporations to respect or protect art. You can’t even buy or screen the original theatrical release of Star Wars. The only option is as you say. There are many more examples of the owners of IP altering it in subsequence editions/iterations. This still seems so insane to me that it’s not even for sale anywhere…

Re: The 'Toy Story' You Remember

#50

Post by nappy »

It's a surprisingly common error where someone picks up an old 35mm print and assumes it is somehow canonical... Besides whatever the provenance of these prints are (this gets complicated) the reality is that these were also made to look at best as they could for typical movie theater projector systems in the 90s. These bulbs were hot and bright and there were many other considerations around what the final picture would look like on the screen. So yeah, if you digitize 35mm film today, it will look different, and different from how its ever been been displayed in a movie theater.
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