Alice in Wonderland (1951)

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General		Extras
Category	Animation	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1951
Running Time	72:26
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Programme
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Clyde Geronimi Hamilton Luske Wilfred Jackson
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Ed Wynn Richard Haydn Sterling Holloway Jerry Colonna Verna Felton Pat O'Malley Bill Thompson Heather Angel Kathryn Beaumont
Case	Amaray-Opaque
RPI	$36.95	Music	Oliver Wallace

    What follows is a journey into the absurd, in a world where almost anything goes. We get to meet Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the Queen of Hearts and various other sundry characters both bewitching and bizarre, all portrayed in a riot of colour and music. It all moves along at a cracking pace that is guaranteed to hold the interest of even the most sophisticated youngster.

Video

    This transfer is surprisingly sharp and clear for a movie created in 1951, and clearly has had considerable care taken in the transfer process, despite the fact that it has been taken from a print element. There is lots of detail in the image and only minor faults to complain about. Scattered throughout the transfer were the occasional extra bright frame or extra dull frame, but these were few and far between and generally the transfer remained remarkably consistent throughout. Being animation, shadow detail was exactly what the animators wanted it to be - black when black was called for and light when light was called for. There was no low level noise to disrupt the image at any stage.

    The colours were clear and vibrant, with no evidence of colour bleed. The occasional very slight variation in colour intensity was noted, but nothing that could be considered anything but inherent in the original.

    No MPEG artefacts were seen. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some moderate aliasing, but the balance between image sharpness and aliasing seems to have been nicely struck with this transfer. As well as aliasing, there was some minor image wobble during the opening titles. Film artefacts were generally remarkably absent from this transfer, with the exception of the period between approximately 40 minutes and 50 minutes. During this time, film artefacts were more frequent, but still rare. They consisted mainly of periodic blue flecks on the image and were not particularly distracting, but will serve to remind you that you are looking at a movie that is nearly 50 years old. Additionally, reel change markings are present in the upper right hand corner of the frame periodically.

Audio

    Dialogue was somewhat muffled and a little hard to make out, giving away the age of the transfer somewhat. It was predominantly mixed into the center channel, and there was little integration between it and the surround channels. There were no audio sync problems.

    The score by Oliver Wallace was fairly typical Disney fare from this era, and did not stand out particularly. The fidelity of the music was considerably higher than that of the dialogue.

    The surround channels carried the music, predominantly in the left and right front hemisphere, with some slight wraparound to the rears. As mentioned previously, the dialogue tended to stay firmly separated into the centre channel except for some limited ambience during the fall down the rabbit hole. Throughout the entire transfer, there seemed to be a constant struggle between dialogue intelligibility, music fidelity and integration. In the end, I felt that the 5.0 remix had managed to achieve an acceptable balance between all three of these conflicting requirements.

    The .1 channel was not encoded.

Menu

    The Region 4 version of this DVD misses out on;

• 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

    Whilst nothing is absolutely compelling about the above extras, the sheer quantity of them would make the R1 version the version of choice.

    The video quality is remarkably good considering the age of the source material.

    The audio quality is as good as can be expected given the nature of the source material.

    There are no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall