Review by Gary Tooze

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• The Making of a Cartoon

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Description: Max and Dave Fleischer's animated classic. At the time of the release of "Gulliver's Travels" in late 1939, the full-length animated motion picture had reached its zenith. This great American art form turned to the retelling of Jonathan Swift's magical tales as the Fleisher's marvelous animation perfectly complimented the story. The gags were clever and the characters endearing, the music perfect, but it is the animation which remains as a lovely visual memorial to two of the men who pioneered this great art!

 

 

The Film:

Excerpt from the New York Times located HERE

Image :    NOTE: The below Blu-ray captures were ripped directly from the Blu-ray disc.
 

Firstly, this film has slipped into the Public Domain and everyone and his brother have produced a DVD version.... but all pale in comparison to the out-of-print Hal Roach Studios Image Entertainment DVD edition using "ORIGINAL 35mm NITRATE TECHNICOLOR MASTER". This Koch Vision Blu-ray image does not appear to equal that SD-DVD although the colors are dramatically improved from most other PD DVDs. This transfer is progressive but looks quite hazy throughout using the inferior MPEG-2 encode. Another huge issue is the aspect ratio. Koch have cropped/zoomed-in this to 1.78 from its original 1.33:1. ?!?  I believe this is the oldest film we have seen reach Blu-ray (edging out Pinocchio by a year - CORRECTION The Adventures of Robin Hood is indeed one year older!- thanks Mike!) but it is far from ideal. "Digitally restored and re-mastered from the original source 35mm film and enhanced for 16x9..." doesn't mean much in this case. Colors bleed and detail is non-existent. It doesn't look particularly smooth in motion either. This is probably a faithful, single-layered hi-def rendering from the source - but I am suggesting that this 'source' was quite poor to begin with. I have a strong interest in older films to Blu-ray even Public Domain stuff but for the weak and altered image we can't recommend this edition based on the image quality.  

CLICK EACH BLU-RAY CAPTURE TO SEE ALL IMAGES IN FULL 1920X1080 RESOLUTION

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Audio may surpass the image quality with three options - a rather meek 5.1 boost, and enhanced 2.0 channel stereo track and a mono one (also 2.0 channel). While the mono sounded better than I anticipated it is far from a linear PCM track that would have been more ideal. The 5.1 gets little in the way of dynamic separation. There are no subtitles which might have been a decent idea. I suspect, being Public Domain, this is region FREE but I suppose we will know soon enough and post it here is it proves to be playable throughout the entire world.

 

BOTTOM LINE:
No, we can't endorse this although we love the concept of older classic to Blu-ray. This appears to have been a poor attempt and although may surpass most DVD editions for certain aspects of the image - the meager print source and aspect ratio manipulation are enough of a reason to pass. It's a shame really. 

Gary Tooze

March 7th, 2009