The Adventures of Huck Finn (1993)

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General		Extras
Category	Family	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1993
Running Time	103:10
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Stephen Sommers
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Elijah Wood Courtney B. Vance Robbie Coltrane Jason Robards
Case	Amaray-Opaque
RPI	$36.95	Music	Bill Conti

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	Full Screen, not known whether Pan & Scan or Full Frame	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	None
16x9 Enhancement	No
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	Dutch English for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    The Adventures Of Huck Finn is based on Mark Twain's classic Huckleberry Finn, a literary classic that has somehow passed me by over the years. Huck (Elijah Wood) is a bit of a rough-and-tumble child, being more-or-less abandoned by his drunkard father, played with aplomb by Ron Perlman. Huck concocts a plan to fake his own death and escape from his abusive father. As he makes his escape, he is joined by a runaway slave, Jim (Courtney B. Vance). They resolve to make their way down the Mississippi River to Cairo, where Jim can escape to the free states, where black men are no longer slaves.

    Their journey is not without incident. Indeed, the whole premise of the movie revolves around the characters of Huck and Jim and how Huck's sense of morality is turned topsy-turvy as a result of his friendship with Jim, and the things they experience both together and separately on their epic journey.

Video

    This transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.33:1. It is not 16x9 enhanced. The framing appears as if this is a Full Frame transfer rather than a Pan & Scan transfer, but in the absence of a widescreen version to compare it to, this is impossible to say for sure.

    This transfer is quite variably sharp. A significant number of shots are very soft indeed and lack definition, and others are acceptable. Shadow detail is often lacking, with many of the darker shots simply diving into undefined areas of blackness. Low level noise, or possibly grain inherent in the source material was present quite markedly from 96:19 - 96:36.

    Colours were also quite variable, ranging from vibrant and bright to dull to oversaturated. There appeared to be significant chroma noise in the background blue from 54:03 - 54:51, though it would not surprise me to learn that this was inherent in the original image, as there are many strongly blue-lit sequences in this movie and all of the rest of them come up very cleanly indeed..

    There was some minor MPEG macro-blocking evident whilst the ship on which Jim finds Huck's father is sinking, but other than this isolated incident, the transfer appeared free of this artefact, despite there being a significant number of smoke-filled scenes. Aliasing was problematic at times for this transfer, plaguing the sharper parts of the image. Film artefacts were kept at an acceptable level, but certainly made themselves noticeable from time to time.

    Subtitles defaulted to ON.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    Dialogue was a little difficult to make out at times, and was a little harder to understand than I expected. There were a number of lines that were clearly ADR processed, with the spoken words not matching the actors' lip movements.

    The score by Bill Conti is most unusual in that it is orchestral and nearly omnipresent, clearly a deliberate stylistic choice to give this movie the feel of a timeless classic or a musical. It is nicely married to the on-screen action, and provides an excellent backdrop on which the movie's visuals can be laid.

    The surround presence is somewhat limited, with only music and some ambience later in the movie making it into the rear surround channel. The great majority of the movie's sound is found in the front hemisphere, with dialogue front-and-center, and music mixed into the left and right front channels.

    The .1 channel was not specifically encoded, though plenty of bass was directed to it.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

    The video quality is just passable.

    The audio quality is passable.

    There are no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall