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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." "
here's a non-registration-required before-and-after example.
you're still going to be turned on by Buggs Bunny dressed in drag.
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
But the process can also remove some of the lines that make up the animation -- for example, erasing lines in Woody Woodpecker's fast-moving beak.
This problem isn't limited to cartoons - I hear that they're running into to similar problems during the restoration of early Ron Jeremy videos.
"for example, blurring Tom's face in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, or erasing lines in Woody Woodpecker's fast-moving beak."
Or making one character seem to fire their blaster first when you were sure that the other fired first last time your watched it.
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!"
Why are they complaining about the tools when it's apparent that it's the workmanship that's at fault?
For an excellent counter example, check out the beautiful work that Animeigo did restoring the original Macross series when they released it on DVD a few years ago. The cleaned up print makes the series look like it was ten years newer.
"There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," - Bill Gates, about Google
Of course.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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?
I'm not sure if this is practical, but how hard is it to actually manually add the missing information after the restoration is done ? Just put back the "Missing Vine" and your done :-D
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.
/. ++
The linked-to images are not before and after examples.
They are examples of artifacts that appear and then disappear in the post-restoration material.
The artifacts do look bad, but there are no "before" images to judge how much good, if any, the restoration is doing.
Just re-draw every single cell.
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!
Different process, but similar concepts. Lots of old music recordings get "destroyed" by digital remastering.
In a case like this (with both the cartoons and the music), i would personally put up with hiss, scratches, dirt and pops until they've got the remastering tools perfected.
My $0.02 + 5.5% tax
do() || do_not();
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
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.
/. ++
Don't worry too much, they still have the original. When the tech comes along they'll do it right and be happy to sell them again. After a little more time they will repackage the first version again as 'classic cut version, the original footing'
Stop invalid scientific research. Ask your local scientists to feed their lab rats with a phytoestrogen-free chow.
Here is David Mackenzie's website (mentioned in the WSJ article, but not linked), which shows a lot of examples:
http://lyris-lite.net/dnr.htmlGood point. One WB cartoon I haven't seen in decades is arguably the funniest. Can't find it anywhere:
In one (very recursive) scene, we find ourselves inside a movie theater, with a carefully illustrated scene of Bogart and Bacall playing on the screen. The "movie", of course, is the weird take of Jones, Freleng, et al. on live action: for example, Bogie casually tosses a flame-thrower to Bacall, instead of a Zippo, when she asks for a light.
At one point, something explodes in Bogie's face (hey, WB cartoon, gotta have at least one explosion). With his soot-covered face, "Bogie" suddenly does an impersonation of Rochester, Jack Benny's long-suffering man-servant.
Now, we can argue back and forth about the racism involved, but the sad fact is that it was a very funny short that fell well within even the most progressive norms of its day. (I honestly don't think any kids today would even get the Rochester joke -- if yours can, dear reader, you have some darn erudite children, I must say.)
Now, if this cartoon was produced today, it would be deemed offensive, and rightfully so. But shouldn't we be allowed to see these older shorts.. while not removing them from the context of their times?
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
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...
They removed the "mammy" voice from the black maid in at least one Tom & Jerry and replaced it with a generic white woman's. Only her legs (black) are shown when she is talking to them. Granted it is mildly racist by today's standards but I'd rather see the original and understand the norms of the time than to be treated like a mindless child who needs to be shielded.
Something that often gets forgotten with regards to older cartoons is that most of them were released theatrically first, and were shot in a widescreen format.
Converting those to the scrunched 4:3 aspect of TV, most of them simply lopped off the edges and zoomed in on a certain part of the actual cartoon.
If you watch old Tom and Jerry or Droopy cartoons on Cartoon Network, many times it is hard to even tell what is going on, because much of the character action takes place just off screen. Other times, people's faces and heads are awkwardly chopped off at the sides.
It may be the case that the theatrical reels have been lost forever, but to me that is far more disappointing than some of the digital hazing that inevitably comes with shoddy, speed-oriented transfers.
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!
neither shalt thou count two, unless thou preceedest directly to three. Five is right out.
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In that 1952 Tex Avery classic, a character reaches into the edge of the frame to pluck a "hair" from the image. It would be sad to see this gag lost to digital restoration.
I am not a crackpot.
I love how it was so un-PC to have a black stereotype like Mammy but the fix was to make her a an Irish stereotype.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
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.
Reporter: "What is your administration doing about the deficit?"
Republican: "A marriage consists of one man and one woman, it's in the Bible. It's 'one nation under God', not Allah or the angel Moroni. We must stop these activist judges from contaminating and impurifying our precious bodily fluids, and replace them with good old fashioned reactionary judges."
Reporter: "Uh...what are we doing to stabilize the situation in Iraq?"
Republican: "We must never forget the lessons of 9/11. We have Osama bin Laden pinned down in the vicinity of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once we figure out how to tell one raghead from another we'll be able to inspect everyone in the region and imprison anyone who isn't Osama. Then, the only guy left ducking into caverns will have to run from our bunker busting bombs and attack choppers. Bring it on!!!"
This process could actually destroy a gag in a cartoon....
Magical Maestro - 1952 - Tex Avery
"One of the most famous Tex Avery gags is his use of a (possibly Rotoscoped) hair in Magical Maestro (MGM, 1952) that acts like a hair caught in the gate of a projector, until Spike plucks it out."
If DNR removes the hair, the entire gag is lost...
This is what happened to _Fantasia_. Around 1985 or 1986 in the dawn of the CD era, Disney decided to digitally re-record the entire soundtrack following the original score exactly with a new orchestra. The VHS tape you saw no doubt contains the new recordings. A lot of people felt that the re-recordings were inferior to the original soundtrack, which was conducted by the great Leopold Stokowski. Disney decided to restore the original soundtrack for the DVD. In fact, the digital re-recordings have been out of print for some years and to my knowledge the only soundtrack CD available is now the original recordings conducted by Stokowski. Since you don't like the DVD music, I'm sorry, but it is what the original film had and what you liked was the re-recordings. I don't criticize you for a question of taste, but I want you to realize that the vast majority of fans of this film prefer the original recordings in all its faulty, mono sound. So you see, the VHS tape you saw is arugably the worst of both worlds - inferior video (even you admit this) and a re-recorded soundtrack in place of the original one.
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
I only need one brain cell to watch cartoons and it's obscured with a canabis haze or I'm half asleep on saturday am anyway....
Rick B.