captainsolo said:
I just happened across the original CAV disc of TLM and the CLV of The Lion King, and while no major Disney fan and certainly not at all as knowledgeable as those in this thread on the topic they blew me away.
Despite being cropped to a 1.33 frame, I had just seen my sister's BD of TLM and in even the LD's opening shots was awestruck at the amount of atmospheric fog that simply wasn't there in the BD. Fine detail was inherent on this disc from 1990 that felt far more natural than anything the BD could muster. I even tried the BD on my CRT screen and that did next to nothing.
I just got out of a "sing-along" screening of TLM - I went solely because the theater website said it would be 35mm. Sure enough, it was - a 1997 print with literally burned-in lyrics.
As I do now with all 35mm screenings I go to, I was studying the image throughout. And right at the beginning, I saw the heavy diffusion in the opening scene. (Eric spotting "Vanessa" om the beach had the fog too - as well as a distinctly brownish cast.)
Lighting effects were blown out (in a very filmic way, not a clipped-whites way), the sunset wedding scene had the characters darkened by the backlit skies just like I remember from the pre-2006 video releases, and the animation lines did look thin (depending on how close the camera was to the artwork, at least), but in a very organic way - they flickered and fluctuated, they didn't look clean and consistent like Disney seems to want their 2D stuff to look now.
And of course, it had GRAIN, that magic ingredient which makes 2D animation look like a FILM instead of a glorified Flash cartoon...
I'd love to see a 1989 print (even though AFAIK the 1997 restoration was strictly photochemical). Did Derann make any Super 8 feature prints?
