Doctor Dolittle

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Main Menu Audio and Animation Theatrical Trailer - 1.33:1, not 16x9, Dolby Digital 2.0 (2:16)
Rating
Year Released	1998
Running Time	81:52 minutes
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	2,4	Director	Betty Thomas
Studio Distributor	Fox Home Entertainment	Starring	Eddie Murphy Ossie Davis Oliver Platt Peter Boyle Richard Schiff Kristen Wilson
Case	Transparent Amaray
RPI	$31.95	Music	Richard Gibbs

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	No	English (Dolby Digital 5.1, 384 Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	?Yes	Smoking	No
Subtitles	Czech Danish English for the Hearing Impaired Finnish Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Norwegian Polish Portuguese Swedish	Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    The film starts with John Dolittle (Eddie Murphy) as a child conversing with a dog, a talent that his father Archer (Ossie Davis) takes a dim view of - especially when John sniffs his new headmaster's butt as a result of that conversation. Jump forward about thirty years and John is now a successful doctor with wife Lisa (Kristen Wilson) and two daughters. With his partners Mark Weller (Oliver Platt) and Gene Reiss (Richard Schiff), he is in the middle of selling his practice and a tad preoccupied - so when he has to violently avoid a dog running onto the road, the resultant car crash seems to reawaken the long buried gift. What follows is an amusing ride as John slowly unravels whilst denying his gift before accepting everything and convincing everyone that he is not insane.

    Not that the story is really that great, but it did not need to be. The whole film is actually made by the animals and their lines as they besiege John. Key amongst them are Lucky, the dog (Norm MacDonald), and Rodney, the guinea pig (Chris Rock). It falls to Rodney to get the best lines in the whole film, and it is a sad situation indeed that the highlight of Chris Rock's career to date is his voicing of a guinea pig. The rest of the cast are solid if not especially memorable. Betty Thomas, far better remembered by me in arguably the best television series ever in Hill Street Blues, directs with a decent hand and certainly worked out pretty well that the concentration on the animals was what was going to make this film memorable. After all, who could possibly forget a guinea pig in a cage atop a car singing The Answer Is Blowing In The Wind!

    Certainly not the greatest comedy ever and not even one of the best Eddie Murphy has done, but a funny film that is a more than pleasant way to spend 80 minutes of your life.

Video

    This is a nicely sharp and detailed transfer that on just a couple of occasions starts to look a little too sharp. This is not an indication of edge enhancement per se, but certainly is a reflection of the exceptionally sharp source print that has really come up phenomenally well in the mastering process. It is a wonderfully clear transfer and there does not appear to be any hint of grain in the transfer at all. Shadow detail is uniformly excellent and there is no indication of any low level noise in the transfer. The only slight downer in the transfer was an indication of overexposure at around the 7:20 mark, where the sky had no real definition at all and seemed to be a very over-bright white.

    The colour palette has a very nice vibrant look to it, with some gorgeously natural tones that make the whole transfer spring to life in general. Most of the colours have a nice solid depth to them and blacks come up very well indeed. Despite the solid saturation of the colours, there is no indication of oversaturation at all and there is no colour bleed apparent in the transfer.

    There did not appear to be any MPEG artefacts in the transfer. There were just a couple of very minor hints of aliasing in the transfer and these constituted the bulk of the film-to-video artefacts. The only really noticeable blemish in the transfer was some rather obvious cross colouration at 36:30. There were a few film artefacts floating around in the transfer but nothing really serious.

    The packaging refers to both an English subtitle option as well as an English for the Hearing Impaired option: the former is not on the DVD, with only the latter present.
 
 

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain
Film-to-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The dialogue comes up well in the soundtrack and is generally very easy to understand, barring one or two instances with the animal voices which were just a little on the hard to catch side. There does not seem to be any problem with audio sync in the transfer other than with the animals - and even then this was not much of an issue.

    The music score comes from Richard Gibbs and a decent enough effort it is. By no means a great film score, it does its job of supporting the film pretty well and certainly does not wear out its welcome too easily.

    There is basically nothing really wrong with the soundtrack, and my trusty notepad is sadly lacking any notes regarding the soundtrack. This can only mean that there was decent use of the surround channels, and especially the rear surround channels, and decent if not especially spectacular use of the bass channel. The soundtrack is free of any distortions or other blemishes and has a nice open feel to the sound without any evidence of congestion. It does its job pretty well indeed.
 
 

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

Theatrical Trailer (2:16)

• Dolby Digital 5.1 448 Kb/s soundtrack

• 16x9 enhancement

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Ian Morris (have a laugh, check out the bio)
17th March, 2001.