Alice in Wonderland (Remastered) (1951)

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General		Extras
Category	Animation	Main Menu Introduction Main Menu Audio & Animation Featurette-Operation Wonderland Karaoke-All In The Golden Afternoon Gallery Game-Adventures In Wonderland Featurette-Thru The Mirror Animated Short
Rating
Year Of Production	1951
Running Time	72:03
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Clyde Geronimi Hamilton Luske Wilfred Jackson
Studio Distributor	Walt Disney Studios Home Ent.	Starring	Ed Wynn Richard Haydn Sterling Holloway Jerry Colonna Verna Felton Pat O'Malley Bill Thompson Heather Angel Heather Beaumont
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$36.95	Music	Oliver Wallace

    While Alice is out with her teacher she notices a walking, talking, white rabbit. Indeed, this rabbit is "late, late, for a very important date" and, not surprisingly, in quite a hurry. Out of piqued curiosity, Alice follows the white rabbit into a rabbit hole, beginning a most amazing adventure. Full of nonsense, cheerful (and not so cheerful) characters, a seemingly endless supply of back-to-front situations, and an amazing ability to somehow seem logical in the face of impossibility, Alice In Wonderland is a classic tale.

    This local re-release only really improves on the original bare bones release by adding a few extras onto the disc.

    Alice In Wonderland is not only for children, as bigger children will be able to reminisce over childhood memories while being swept along with the colourful adventure. This is a great movie to escape from life's toil with. Just sit back, reminisce, and enjoy the ride. It may even keep the kids occupied for 70 minutes!

Video

    The transfer is presented in the non-enhanced aspect ratio of 1.33:1. This is very closely matched to the original aspect ratio of 1.37:1.

    The transfer is very sharp throughout with all animation clearly defined. There is no shadow detail as such, but the black levels are fine without any low-level noise. There is some grain throughout the movie but this would be primarily inherent in the source materials and not introduced by the transfer to DVD.

    Colour is well saturated and bright throughout. You would expect excellent use of colour in a Disney animation and this is certainly no exception. The DVD transfer very successfully presents the chaotic lunacy found in Wonderland with exceptional use of strong primary colours.

    There is very limited pixelization to be seen throughout the transfer. Occasionally, there is some background pixelization in fast panning shots, but this is really minimally disruptive and you really have to be looking for it. The beginning of the transfer suffers from telecine wobble, mostly during the intro sequence and credits. There is also some minor telecine wobble on display at various stages throughout the transfer, but this does not detract from the viewing experience. Film artefacts are obvious throughout, but again this is still acceptable. Given the age of the source material, it must have been very well preserved.

    I sampled the English and English for the Hearing Impaired subtitles available on this disc. They were quite accurate to the spoken word, quite a feat considering some of the words spoken in Alice In Wonderland!

    This is a Dual Layered disc, as far as I can tell. It would seem that the video transfer from the original single layer release has been reused completely, while the added extras have been placed on the second layer.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    There are three audio tracks available, all Dolby Digital 5.1, in English, Norwegian, and Danish. All tracks are encoded at 384kbps. It would appear that the audio has been remastered slightly for this re-release as the .1 channel is present in this version, although it does not get used. Apart from the presence of the .1 channel, there seems to be little difference between the old and new releases.

    Dialogue is a little bit distorted throughout. This can be attributed to the age of the recording and is not the fault of the transfer. Having said that, the distortion is really not bad, and will not ruin the movie at all. Audio sync is spot-on throughout - well, as spot-on as animation can ever be.

    Oliver Williams can be thanked for the score. Nothing remarkably exciting but it is well suited to the on-screen action. You can't really expect much more than standard Disney fare on this one. It is also interesting to note that the score has lower levels of distortion than the dialogue.

    The surround presence on this disc is certainly not going to be used to impress visitors. This is a very frontal soundscape with limited use of the surrounds for ambience. The most notable use of ambience can be found around 5:30 as Alice is crawling into the rabbit hole. The subwoofer remained silent throughout - not really surprising.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

Operation Wonderland (10:55)

All in the Golden Afternoon Sing Along (2:33)

Photo Gallery

Adventures in Wonderland Game

Thru the Mirror - Animated Short (8:48)

• Alice In Wonderland DVD Storybook
• Alice In Wonderland Trivia Game
• "Operation Wonderland" Featurette
• "The Unbirthday Song" Sing-Along
• "All In The Golden Afternoon" Sing-Along
• Theatrical Trailer

• Alice In Wonderland DVD Storybook
• "The Unbirthday Song" Sing-Along
• Theatrical Trailer

• Thru the Mirror - Animated Short
• Photo Gallery

    There is no real reason to choose the R1 over the local release. The Animated Short is probably enough reason to get the R4 release, at least in my opinion.

    The video quality is excellent when taking the movie's age into consideration.

    The audio quality is also quite good.

    The extras are reasonable.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall