but it’s cropped )-:
It isn’t cropped, it’s matted. The 2013 Blu-ray was matted and cropped on all four sides compared to the open matte Gold Classic Collection/45th Anniversary Edition DVD and the matted Disney+ stream.
oh
so it was made with that aspect ratio in mind
that’s good to know
As best as I can remember reading, all their films from the 60s to the (80s-00s?) were made so they could be shown matted to widescreen in theaters but also be shown open-matted on television, something that obviously included videotapes when they became popular. I’m sure BOTH versions are valid by design since Disney knew there’d be different ways an audience can view them.
Disney needs to start giving other companies a chance to restore their films because of their botched jobs.
Oh, and give the audience the original theatrical cuts of films and not the edited versions, that really crappy for them not to.
This may be unpopular of me to say but I think MOST of the Disney restorations look great. Granted, I’ve seen the one running away scene in Cinderella, screenshots of the bad Sword in the Stone, and the alligator/blue bird scene in Lion King, coupled with the fact that I hadn’t watched most of the films between my “little kid” and “young adult years”, but I like how they look. The older cel and paper films look like animation of the era. I know Disney removed some of the mistakes (like paint variations and cel mis-alignment), but they didn’t go so far to make them look like… well, like the CAPS made films. Granted, they should be taken to task for bad restorations but there’s two points I want to make:
1.) Disney+'s version of The Sword in the Stone shows they know when they screwed up and will possibly use the move to 4K as a chance to fix mistakes.
2.) Comparisons to theatrical prints may not tell the whole story. Granted, the filmmakers may’ve made choices based on how it’ll look on a theatrical print many generations down but that has to be weighed against the fact that the print a fan today maybe looking at today has aged and might no longer look like how it did when first made. Also, prints were made to be trashed after the theater run, so I can’t imagine them being the best representations compared to the negatives and interpositives Disney would’ve been looking at. Again, it might not be the best approach for Disney to match the films to the artwork in their archives without thinking of how they would’ve looked after many stages in copying but I doubt we can judge by prints. For all we know, what we’re seeing now may be what the artists were trying for.