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Classic Cartoons Marred by Digital Restoration
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "When classic animated films undergo digital restoration, key features can get lost in translation. The Wall Street Journal reports that the process meant to smooth over scratches and dirt specks on old film "can also remove some of the lines that make up the animation -- for example, blurring Tom's face in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, or erasing lines in Woody Woodpecker's fast-moving beak." "
They're doing a half-assed job of the restoration. Not that I care about these particular cartoons, but some people do.
Restoration... apparently that word does not mean what I think it means.
- MreX
Walt Disney Co. has largely avoided criticism of its cartoon restorations. For most of its projects, Disney doesn't use digital noise reduction, relying instead on artists to inspect each frame of film and remove defects either manually or with proprietary software. "If you just take a film and throw it through a noise-reduction system, you're never going to get the same standard of quality," says Jeff Miller, president for world-wide post-production and operations.
Although I'm not surprised, I'm disappointed that this isn't part of the standard process. To me, just running the film through DNR is lazy and indicative of a company just trying to make a quick buck. If you want to use a DNR machine, you gotta get a real person to check the work. Period.
Clearly, those responsible have no excuse for it. Again, FTFA:
Craig Hoffman, a spokesman for Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros., which released the Looney Tunes DVDs last fall, declines to comment on the complaints about the restored cartoons. "There's a wide audience: children, collectors, people who grew up loving them," he adds.
What exactly does a wide audience, or people who grew up loving [Looney Tunes] have to do with your quality control? Is passing a shoddy product off to some members of that wide audience acceptable? I can understand that young kids may not know the difference, but if you're targeting a wide audience, you gotta account for more than young kids.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
Am I the only one who starts to get paranoid about the changing of history?
Star Wars IV-VI, Disney cartoons, now these.
Where does it end?
Where did I leave my tinfoil hat?
From your article:
At first thought, it seems silly to put new cartoons through DVNR because they shouldn't be dirty, or so you'd think. Danny Antonucci, creator of Ed, Edd n Eddy, says that when negatives come back from Korea, they are so dirty that it's a necessity to run them through DVNR.
Yikes. From the sounds of it, you'd think they're processing the film in grass huts!
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Sure we can digitally process it, but in the next decade the digital reprocessing will evolve, probably along the lines of the neural network, so that it can make better distinctions between fine lines and scratches. If they have to make some money on the technology, let them enhance products like Media Cleaner and improve digital video for a while. Remember Ted Turner's colorized classics? It was a big thing that never really went anywhere, because in the end it just didn't look right. Don't rush it, not with the classics. Human beings spent hours on every frame of those films. It was a labor of love. Digitally detracting from that level of commitment just because they can is a poor excuse abusing and disrespecting the art.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Not only the things they said, but the violence. Tom and Jerry were extremely violent. Most of the Bugs Bunny cartoons included someone being blown up or shot.
Somehow we all managed to watch them and not turn out to be homicidal maniacs. Today, if a cuddly teddy bear trips and lands on his butt that might get banned for promoting the dangerous act of falling on ones rump.
/. ++
A number of the old cartoons are kept in a closet of dirty secrets because they had racist themes in them. They're no longer being broadcast, which I suppose is fine as no one should have to put up with watching them, but the flipside of this is that they're being flushed down the memory hole, enabling us to sanitize our memory and pretend that we've always been a right and just society. I'd much rather lose a line or two in a digital restoration than to have these hideous examples lost to history.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
We all watched the cartoons, with their dirt and specks and the occasional hair. I never felt there was anything wrong with that stuff. It was just part of the animation and broadcast processes. It doesn't detract from the cartoons. Going back and "fixing" these minor defects would be like filling in the cracks in the paint on the Mona Lisa. It was art before it was perfect. Now, I'm not so sure.
This space for rent.
That has changed over the past 5-6 years. At first I thought it was just me outgrowing the charm of cartoons (I'm 27). But then I realized it wasn't me or my tastes that were changing. It was the quality of the new productions that was sadly deteriorating.
This applies to most of the cartoons produced by the major animation houses in Hollywood - WB, Disney, etc. The new Tom and Jerry cartoons are a joke compared to their witty and charming predecessors. It seems that most of the focus now is on better animation and special effects through computer animation, and less focus on the *wit* and everyday humor that made them so popular in the first place.
Take any old Tom and Jerry cartoon (directed by Fred Quimby) - you'll see it based on a cat and mouse chase in the familiar settings of a house or backyard. Fastforward to their newer counterparts (incidentally directed by Chuck Jones) and you'll see a sophisticated setting like a Spaceship or France, with better graphics, but almost *no* wit or simple but *clever* plots that were common in the episodes of old.
The same holds for the Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Mickey Mouse and other classics. The trend seems to be towards slicker animation, with little or *no* emphasis to creative wit/humor. The newer cartoons are all rehashes or remakes of the successful plots with smaller "Tiny Toon" versions of the characters.
I prefer completely new (and independently produced, I think) cartoons like Johnny Bravo, Courage the Cowardly Dog, etc better to these incredibly non-creative rehased versions of the classics, that the studios seem to want to cash in on.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
It's not practical. First of all, it would be easier and more effective to just remove the unwanted artifacts manually in the first place. Secondly, if you are going to go around re-drawing things in the cartoon, well then, gee, you might as well just re-draw the whole cartoon... I'm sure the original artists would not be pleased with that. It would be like someone trying to restore The Last Supper by repainting over the problem areas.
This problem is analogous to digital sound restoration. You can use digital hiss and pop reduction techniques, but in the end you lose some of the stuff you are trying to save. It's impossible to put it back. I'd rather listen to a hissy old recording than one that's been "restored" and sounds hollow.
half assed restoration'. But no, gotta blame the Digits. Where's the personal responsibility. The Digits had nothing to do with this. I think what happened is they took a stab at restoring Popeye in the Land of the Goons and are now being, for all intents and purposes, blackballed. It was thought that all copies had been destroyed. Cultural sensitivity trumps culture, you know. Can't portray cargo cult and head hunters in a negative light.
If anyone has a pointer to a copy of 'Popeye in the Land of the Goons', I have been looking for years...
Some characters have dissapeared completely anyways.
I wonder what you would say about Itchy and Scratchy!
:)
I would say that they are a parody of how violent Tom and Jerry were.
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According to the article given by the first poster, they even have digital tools to speed up this process as well. Thus the only real excuse is "we don't want to spend the time or money". *shrug*
Well, "Tom & Jerry" ain't exactly "Gone With the Wind" is it?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Well, "Tom & Jerry" ain't exactly "Gone With the Wind" is it?
No kidding. Tom & Jerry is WAY more important!
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It makes me think, are current digital media that we used today need to be "restored" in next 50 years? Who knows what kind of storage technology we use then...
I guess it is just one more reason why infinite copyright is a really bad idea. Cartoons like those should be entering the public domain by now.
I also have a DVD of Metropolis (1926), restored as best as modern technology will allow. But that's a lost cause, in this instance, since all the movie destruction was accomplished by its 1927 release in the US, and all the present resoration can do is add 15 minutes to the US release, which means there are still 45 minutes missing somewhere, presumed never to be seen. The modern soundtrack uses the original orchestration.
It's too easy to say that modern resorations get it wrong. The problem is, modern CHEAP restorations don't do as good a job as modern EXPENSIVE restorations, and at that point we have to consider whether the restoration costs will ever be recovered. I don't know if the restoration of Snow White made a profit, but perhaps from Disney's perspective it was more important to have a high-quality modern digital conversion. Although Metropolis is a movie that should be preserved for eternity (750 minor roles plus 30,000 crowd scenes for what ultimately proved to be a gigantic leap beyond Birth of a Nation, a mere decade before; contrast with our modern ability to discuss minor plot and tech improvements over 3 decades between the various Star Wars episodes), it's unlikely that anyone attempting a definitive preservation will ever actually recover the costs involved.
At the dawn of cinematography, they used the best technology that was available year-by-year. In the late 1960's, much of the film industry moved away from that concept to filming on what is basically consumer-grade Ektachrome, with the Technicolor equipment having been sold off to China. So we have two or more decades of movies that will simply vanish unless we start protecting them now. The problem is, we need to protect the junk as well as the good stuff, in case future generations modify our values. Mre recently, the situation has improved because stock is more likely to be on digital media.
But when we think we're failing to preserve old movies, we shouldn't necessarily blame ourselves. In recent decades, the original movie makers made that decision for us.
fail to see why you need to digital restore Rocket Robin Hood and the like...
I am sure most of you have seen Disney's Fantasia. Well, I have seen it, back in the days of my childhood, at a private projection (therefore, from an old reel). Even though it was very long ago, I have a very vivid memory of that event, because I have always loved classical music, and I thought that Fantasia had some of the best, most inspired and heartfelt, interpretations.
Then, about 4 years ago we purchased Fantasia on DVD, and as wewatched, I had the strange feeling that "this is just not right". I could not put my finger on it, but the music sounded devoid of excitement.
Then I remembered an old friend from primary school who had Fantasia on a very old VHS tape, and watched it. The picture had imperfections, the color was not as stable as on the DVD, but nothing that would bother me. And the music - well, it was completely different.
I came to the conclusion that, during the digital remastering, they must have done some DSP magic to remove noise and stuff, and actually killed it. Yeah, it's kinda the same music, it just feels wooden, to me totally useless. Why are the MPAA companies doing this? Obviously, because they don't care. I imagine that the larger majority of the public would not notice the difference, except that "hey, there's less noise, it must be better, right?".
Sigged!
I'm happy just so long as they don't touch "The Rabbit of Seville."
:-)
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Well, they handle that by censoring away the whole cartoon or at least the two parts that are "culturaly sensitive" now. Those being the parts where the dog is squished and blackface and where he and the rabbits are some kind of south seas natives and chanting.
They aren't shielding you, they are shielding themselves from idiotic (yet costly) lawsuits.
Actually, they're shielding themselves from idiotic public outry. A vocal minority getting their dander up and organizing a stupid boycott is more dangerous than a lawsuit. A lawsuit needs to have a claim of damages, and any suit wherein damages are claimed as a result of simply viewing a cartoon will likely be summarily dismissed at little cost. A baseless rumor that a TV station is "racist" because they showed a historically accurate cartoon is the bigger threat. You can't get a judge to order public sentiment to turn and go the other way.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
When I was in college, the local cable company's public access station stayed on the air every weekend by running, in a continuous loop, 6-hour tapes of "Cartoon Control Room with Sloucho Barx," basically an unmoving camera shot of a guy in an ill-fitting Groucho mask sitting at the switcher and cueing up tape after tape from his extensive cartoon collection.
One week, Sloucho ran an entire show with the theme of censored, racist, or otherwise inappropriate cartoons. There were some doozies - all of it WB and MGM stuff - but in its defence everything he aired was first shown on the big screen during Saturday matinees in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Moreover, between every cartoon he offered disclaimers and deprecations, stating the show was meant to illustrate the mindset of the past, neither he nor the cable company supported these views, if you're letting your kids watch this you'd better be talking to them about what they're seeing, I can't believe what an awful joke that was, etc. etc.
Of course the complaints poured in anyway, and needless to say it was Sloucho's last show.
Back to the main topic... aside from Sloucho's fondness for the early-30s WB cartoon "Freddy the Freshman," which he played on every one of his shows, he also clued me in on another obscure one, Chuck Jones' 1940 "The Dover Boys." In it, Jones experimented with a sort of visual shorthand, with fast swooshing movements punctuated by stylised poses. The characters move across the screen as colourful blurs, saving the animators from having to draw a complete figure with every frame. Nowadays it's a common thing - such as the Road Runner's spinning legs - but this was the cartoon where it all began.
"The Dover Boys" is included on WB's Looney Tunes Vol. 2, and I fear what they might have done to action frames that could be construed as being nothing but noise.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."--Feynman
Indeed. It's not so ridiculously over-the-top racist like "Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarves". Now there's a cartoon we'll never see on TV! One good thing about P2P networks is that it provides a controversy-proof outlet for "ojectionable" material like "Coal Black", "Song of the South", or the wartime propaganda cartoons.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Oddly, the mammy character is probably the most sane character in those cartoons. I'm not sure why they voiced her over. Children might wonder why a cat and a mouse would be living in a household with a black lady?
But then again, when I was little, I didn't think that Bert and Ernie had to explain their living arrangement.