Annie (1999)

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General		Extras
Category	Family	Main Menu Audio
Rating
Year Of Production	1999
Running Time	86:03 (Case: 134)
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Rob Marshall
Studio Distributor	Disney Walt Disney Studios Home Ent.	Starring	Alicia Morton Kathy Bates Alan Cumming Audra McDonald Kristin Chenoweth Victor Garber Andrea McArdle Erin Adams Sarah Hyland Lalaine Nanea Miyata Marissa Rago Danelle Wilson
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$19.95	Music	Charles Strouse

    Not quite enough. I’m sorry to say that this version of Annie, while not without merit, is too short, drab, and toothless. It seems to be aimed at exceptionally young children, and even they may well figure out that they’re missing something. The reason for this underwhelming tepidity is easily summarised: Made For Television By Disney. Making this material into an 86-minute telemovie means cutting out songs and compressing the story to the point where it has no room to breathe; making it on a television budget (and in a full-screen aspect ratio) means denying it the scale, squalor and splendour it deserves; and making it for a thoroughly lukewarm G-rating means sucking out all but the last dregs of the menace, heartache and politics that Annie needs. Director and choreographer Rob Marshall does his best to overcome these constraints, and his work here is often great fun. But I was left feeling dissatisfied.

    This is a re-adaptation of the Broadway musical, rather than a remake of the film, and it doesn’t include any of the songs specifically written for the latter: Dumb Dog, Sandy, Let’s Go To The Movies, We Got Annie, and Sign. Neither does it include the stage songs We’d Like To Thank You, You Won’t Be An Orphan For Long, Annie, and A New Deal For Christmas. The numbers we do get – Maybe, The Hard-Knock Life, NYC, Little Girls, I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here, Easy Street, Fully Dressed, Something Was Missing, and I Don’t Need Anything But You – are well sung, and enjoyably choreographed within the severe limitations of scope and budget. Rob Marshall is clearly influenced by the work of Bob Fosse, as he would soon confirm with his adaptation of Fosse’s Chicago. He works his cast well; Alicia Morton is an appealing Annie, Victor Garber a solid Daddy Warbucks, and Alan Cumming an enthusiastically unpleasant Rooster Hannigan. Kathy Bates, though no lithe dancer, gives her all as the villainous Miss Hannigan. Audra McDonald lends a lovely voice to Grace, personal secretary to Warbucks – lovely enough to distract one from her very forced romantic subplot. Annie’s implausibly pan-ethnic fellow orphans are agreeably non-repulsive. Everyone else fades into the background.

Video

   The aspect ratio is 1.33:1, exactly as originally broadcast.

   Annie is a quickly-made telemovie, and looks like one. The image is always a little soft and unexciting; there are a lot of dark or poorly-lit scenes, often with very little shadow detail – like the bar interior at 49:34. There is little or no visible grain, and there are no film artefacts at all.

   Rob Marshall may have made a deliberate effort to evoke the Depression era by muting the colour palette; certainly the film looks drab and brown, whether it was intentional or not. Alas, the effect is simply to make everything look a little uglier and more… depressing. Skin tones suffer, too. There are no colour artefacts, but then there’s just not that much colour.

   A few MPEG artefacts crop up – aliasing on a cushion at 12:23, and on blinds at 48:24 and 55:55, and some macro-blocking on a lamp at 52:13.

   The subtitles are well placed, readable and accurate – and very helpful if you want to learn the songs!

   This is a dual-layered disc, with the layer change so well placed between segments (Yes! Segments! With blackout-for-commercial-break between them!) that I was unable to detect it.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

   There are three audio tracks: a default English Dolby Digital 5.1 track at 448 Kbps, and a pair of German and French Dolby Digital 2.0 tracks at 192 Kbps. The dubs are reasonable, if of necessarily lower quality given the audio format.

   All dialogue and singing comes through the centre channel, and is perfectly clear and without hiss. There was an audio blip at 75:40 during Grace’s reprise of Tomorrow – a momentary distortion in the sound possibly due to pitch correction. There were no problems with audio synchronisation.

   Charles Strouse’s wonderful original music is quintessential Broadway – sweetly sentimental one moment, brassily hilarious the next. All the numbers sound terrific here, solidly ensconced in the front left and right channels.

   The surround channel gets almost nothing to do for most of the film, only coming (barely) alive to provide some slight support for NYC and Anything But You, and to enhance the crowd noise at 60:38. This is not a disc to show off your surround sound setup with.

   The subwoofer gets to support the low end of the music, and that’s about it. Annie is not an action-packed film; there isn’t so much as a car backfire here.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    There are no bonus features whatsoever – a great pity, since it would have been interesting to hear the cast and crew talk about the differences between the various iterations of Annie, and the reasoning behind the decisions taken with this adaptation.

Menu

   The Region 4 version of this disc misses out on;

• TV Spots

• Nothing

   The video quality is adequate.

   The audio quality is very good.

   The extras are nonexistent.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall