(Reel change)
Not in a natural break point either, just like this paragraph! Archers pull back... and red break. Now we get the horrors of war, which is to say Gulliver's rotoscoped face. Gulliver has sock issues. The contrast between the cartoons and rotoscoping makes it even more horrible. Perhaps people were impressed by the horror; they certainly bought into it in Snow White. It's a Hap Hap Happy Day is a bit more like a Fleischer cartoon, as it's not dire or romantic like the rest of the movie so far. Gabby in the pocket looks good. Some of the problem with rotoscoping: animated skin tone is fine on cartoons, but is profoundly wrong on human surfaces. The spies are good looking. It seems like each musical number may have been treated as its own separate cartoon. The timing on the spy jokes is too fast, in spite of the fact that almost everything else is timed too slowly.
Weird rhyming interlude with Gulliver and Gabby. Shadow puppets. It would have been funnier if Gulliver had put out the fire like he did in the book.
I'm sure had he seen this movie, Swift would have loved Gabby. "Brilliant! Why didn't I think of that!" would have been his obvious exclamation. He would also love the hap-hap- happy day song 'cuz it just flat out rocks dude.
ReplyDeleteDo you know which DVD version we should buy? There's a huge storm over the 'digitally restored' version.
ReplyDeleteThe BluRay release last year was cropped to widescreen and DVN-Rd, as I understand it. Those are bad things.
ReplyDeleteAs to earlier releases, here's a thread on it:
http://forums.goldenagecartoons.com/showthread.php?t=7945
Having not compared them myself, I don't really have an opinion to visual quality (other than to say the prints I've watched aren't exactly high quality). It's on the 600 cartoon set from Mill Creek, which makes up for what it lacks in quality by having all but two of the non-Popeye 1939 Fleischer cartoons on it (and at least some of the Popeyes; with the good sets, I just never had to check what it does and doesn't have).