Labyrinth (Blu-ray) (1986)

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General		Extras
Category	Fantasy	Main Menu Audio & Animation Featurette-Inside The Labyrinth Featurette-Kingdom Of Characters Featurette-The Quest For Goblin City
Rating
Year Of Production	1986
Running Time	101:03
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Jim Henson
Studio Distributor	Sony Pictures Home Entertain	Starring	David Bowie Jennifer Connelly
Case	Amaray Variant
RPI	$34.95	Music	David Bowie Trevor Jones

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 French Dolby TrueHD 5.1 German Dolby TrueHD 5.1 English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	1080p
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English English for the Hearing Impaired French German Arabic Danish Dutch Finnish Hindi Norwegian Swedish Turkish English French German Dutch	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Labyrinth is a story with several layers, depending on how metaphorical one wishes to get. Being that this is a family-oriented film and most of the metaphorical layers fans of my generation have speculated about are a bit more adult in nature, I will stick with the surface plot. Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) is a fairly ordinary girl in her mid-teens. A bit spoiled, perhaps, but that is partly the point of the story. We never get much establishment of the fact because Henson dispenses with the real-world-based things as quickly as he possibly can and goes straight into the fantasy. An understandable decision from a directorial point of view, since fantastic and particularly puppet-based things are where he excelled. Anyway, after some terse words with her father and stepmother, Sarah wishes that the goblins would come and take away the baby brother, Toby (Toby Froud) that is the focus of her frustration. So when Jareth (David Bowie), the Goblin King, comes and does exactly that, she begs and pleads with him for Toby's safe return.

    Instead of returning Toby, which would make this an incredibly short film, Jareth poses a challenge to Sarah. She must navigate the titular labyrinth and get to the castle at the centre of it to retrieve Toby within a thirteen hour period, or Toby will be turned into a Goblin. Along the way, Sarah is ably assisted and hindered by a myriad of odd characters. The most important of which are a Dwarf called Hoggle (Shari Weiser, Brian Henson), a dog who calls himself Sir Didymus (Dave Goelz, David Alan Barclay, David Shaugnessy), and by a long road my favourite, a hairy roaring giant called Ludo (Ron Mueck, Rob Mills). Along the way to the castle, Sarah makes her way through a series of set pieces designed to exhibit both Jim Henson's opulence of imagination and the incredible skill of the production team he had in many cases been working with for the best part of a decade. Where Labyrinth really shines, however, is the story and script written by Dennis Lee, Jim Henson, Terry Jones, and an uncredited Elaine May.

    But more than anything, the film serves as a great fable about how lost we are when we judge one another by appearances or first impressions. Indeed, although it is not really saying much when David Bowie is the most normal-looking principal cast member aside from the heroine, watching Sarah and Ludo interact never fails to stir something deep within the imaginative centres of my brain. Put simply, Labyrinth is one of the things that make me happy to be a Child Of The '80s, and to see it as a Blu-ray Disc is a delight that even great poetic languages such as Latin or Norwegian lack the words to properly describe.

Video

    The video transfer on this disc shows the age of the film very clearly, but it is still better than I was really expecting.

    The video transfer is presented in the aspect ratio of 2.35:1 within a 1920 by 1080 progressive window.

    The sharpness of the transfer varies slightly at times. For a good nine tenths of the running time, the transfer is so sharp one can see such things as the uneven dilation of David Bowie's eyes with a clarity I never would have imagined from home video. Occasionally, at points such as when Jennifer Connelly is crossing the Bog Of Eternal Stench set, there is a moderate drop-off in sharpness that is suggestive of deterioration to the negatives or the source material. Some drop-offs in sharpness can be traced back to the use of optical composition effects. Others are a little harder to explain. Lest this qualification put you off, however, the vast majority of the time, this transfer is excellent.

    The colours in the film are generally somewhat muted and drab, a definite creative decision on Henson's part. The transfer renders the colours of the film faithfully, with no oversaturation, undersaturation, misregistration, or bleeds. Flesh tones are rendered with extreme accuracy, an especially important point with the different skins on all the puppets.

    Compression artefacts were not in evidence during this transfer. The transfer has been compressed with the AVCHD codec and generally ranges from the mid twenties to mid thirties in bitrate. Film to video artefacts were either non-existent or limited to a slight wobble that I am currently inclined to blame on a slightly imperfect camera mechanism rather than the telecine. And again, this problem, when it did show up, was limited to the blink-and-miss-it range. Film artefacts consisted of the occasional small black or white mark on the picture. These were will within acceptable limits given the age of the picture, and much improved compared to what I remember of the DVD.

    Subtitles are offered in English and English for the Hearing Impaired. The latter are very faithful to the spoken dialogue, but omit the lyrics of the songs to my major disappointment.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    A total of four soundtracks are offered on this disc. The first, and default, is the original English dialogue in Dolby TrueHD 5.1, a definite upgrade over the Dolby Digital 2.0 that was offered on the DVD I have floating in my junk boxes somewhere. Dubs are also offered in Dolby TrueHD 5.1, in French and German. These are quite limited in their fidelity compared to the English soundtrack. A good example occurs during the Magic Dance number, where the dub actor's voice is a good decibel or three louder than David Bowie's singing voice. Finally, an audio commentary is offered in Dolby Digital 2.0, which apart from some very limited reflections of the original soundtrack that my receiver redirected to the surrounds, is basically stereo.

    The dialogue is clear and easy to understand at all times, even from Ludo. That separation between dialogue, sound effects, and music that I crave like so much substance is very profound here. Had you come to me in 1988 and told me that this film would one day sound like this, I just flat out would not have believed you. No problems with audio sync were especially evident beyond the usual slight sense I normally get from watching puppets "speak".

    The real star of this film, however, is David Bowie, and the music provided by him. A score by Trevor Jones is integrated with Bowie's numbers, and the two work together beautifully. Surprisingly for a children's film, a lot of the score music is based around minor arpeggios on what sounds like a synethesiser imitating a guitar that would not sound out of place at all on a Black Sabbath record. But it is the songs by David Bowie that have remained in my memory long after I stopped watching the film on analogue formats. At 22:40, Bowie begins a song called Magic Dance that not only teleports me to a childhood I never really got to have, it demonstrates very clearly that lossy audio formats are living on borrowed time. If the rumours about bringing out a new high resolution audio format based on the Blu-ray structure turn out to be true, then I urge the powers that be to get David Bowie onto that format at launch. I can barely stand to listen to him on CD anymore after this transfer, such is the improvement in fidelity offered here.

    The surround channels are variably used to support sound effects, music, and the occasional reverberated dialogue. During set pieces such as the Bog Of Eternal Stench, flatulence noises for example are directed around the surrounds and create some atmosphere. However, these sequences also reveal the age of the film and the limitations of the media on which it has been archived all this time. During musical sequences, however, the surrounds literally roar into life, echoing Bowie and his backing vocalists along with ambient instruments. During the quiet dialogue sequences that keep the groundwork for the plot solid, unfortunately, the sound field does become a very two-channel affair. This is a reflection of the original sound design, so it is not too disappointing.

    The subwoofer is gently used to support the music, the sound of Ludo roaring, the occasional cannon shot, and other such bass-heavy effects. It was not worked especially hard, but it did the job without calling undue attention to itself.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    A small selection of extras are on this disc. None of them are high definition. Their historical value, on the other hand, is incalcuable.

Menu

Audio Commentary: Brian Froud

Picture-In-Picture

Featurette - Inside The Labyrinth

    Presented in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio with Dolby Digital 2.0 audio, this featurette is clearly incredibly old. But it is worthy of inclusion for the footage of David Bowie and his backing vocalists performing in the studio. It looks like they had a lot of fun in spite of the early hour cited. It is also worth having for a comparison between the film in its proper aspect ratio and the Cut And Shut that was presented on VHS. Fifty-six minutes, twenty-seven seconds.

Featurette - Kingdom Of Characters

    Presented in the aspect ratios of 2.35:1 and 1.78:1 with Dolby Digital 2.0 audio. Standard definition, but 16:9 Enhanced. George Lucas is carrying that extra chin very nicely. The quality is somewhat naff, but the historical curiosity aspect makes it well worthwhile. Twenty-seven minutes, fifty-eight seconds.

Featurette - The Quest For Goblin City

    Also presented in the aspect ratios of 2.35:1 and 1.78:1 with Dolby Digital 2.0 audio. Also standard definition, but 16:9 Enhanced. The video quality is slightly better in this featurette. Thirty minutes and four seconds.

    The video transfer is very good.

    The audio transfer is excellent.

    The extras are minimal but interesting.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall