White Fang

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General		Extras
Category	Adventure	Theatrical Trailer(s)	No
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	No
Year Released	1991	Commentary Tracks	No
Running Time	104:20 minutes	Other Extras	None
RSDL/Flipper	No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Movie
Region	2,4	Director	Randal Kleiser
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Klaus Maria Brandauer Ethan Hawke
RRP	$34.95	Music	Basil Poledouris

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	No	MPEG	None
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1	Dolby Digital	2.0
16x9 Enhancement		Soundtrack Languages	English (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192 Kb/s) French (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192 Kb/s) Italian (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192 Kb/s)
Theatrical Aspect Ratio	1.85:1 ??	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	Yes	Smoking	Yes
Subtitles	Dutch English for the Hearing Impaired	Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    A very youthful looking Ethan Hawke (a fine actor, and amongst my favourite) plays Jack, whose parents have passed away. He has basically nothing to lose by trying to find gold which his father believed lay in the wilds of Alaska sometime late in the century before last (though I am only guessing). He is helped by two men he befriends, and during the course of his journey he meets a wolf-dog whom the Indians have named "White Fang". Jack and his friends use him for labour because they make very effective working dogs. I am not going to detail every plot twist, but suffice it to say a bond is formed between Jack and White Fang which ensures that the movie has just enough tension generated throughout for the ending to be a real tear-jerker if you are that way inclined (my wife nearly drowned). I would suggest that there are times during this movie, such as the arranged dog-fighting scenes which many might find a bit heavy going. I also have renewed respect for bears after seeing an absolutely enormous one nearly kill Jack, and so the PG rating is well deserved.

Video

    Image sharpness is somewhat variable, and on the whole the image tends towards being a little soft. At times, however, the clarity and detail amazed me. Close up shots of various wolves and dogs revealed an enormous amount of information, with every hair being perfectly defined. Much of the film has a documentary feel to it, as if you were watching wolves on the Discovery channel, and it gave me pause for thought, because documentaries would benefit enormously from this kind of resolution and clarity. I had to lock my pooch in the other room because he got carried away when there were dogs on the screen, though he is not as discerning as me! Shadow detail was reasonably good, and sometimes very good, and there was no low level noise at all. However, most of the movie is shot outdoors in the snow, and there is definitely no lighting problem there! There is no visible edge-enhancement, making for a very film-like image. Luminance saturation was perfect, even in very testing conditions, with no oversaturation.

    Colours were extraordinarily well rendered. First off, most of the movie is filmed outdoors, in the snow, and as strange as this might sound, the snow is white. Perfectly white. If you have ever taken pictures of the snow, you will appreciate this immediately. With that taken care of, all the other colours fall nicely into place. Some shots were breathtaking to behold with the rich green of trees, the clear blue of the sky and the white snow, and the cinematography by Tony Pierce-Roberts is not wasted on this transfer.

    The one real let down for this transfer is the MPEG compression. The quality (and length) of this transfer really begs for this disc to be RSDL formatted, because space is just a tad tight on one layer for 105 minutes, regardless of what the "spec" says. For the most part, the transfer is solid enough, but macro-blocking is evident in far backgrounds - mountains for instance, and is even more prominent in panning shots. There are also times when certain parts of the image would freeze momentarily, and be updated more slowly than foreground information. Now, many of you may not be bothered by or even notice this, but my eye is naturally drawn to artefacts of this kind, and they are off-putting for me. I therefore have to mark down the otherwise excellent transfer because of this, which is unfortunate.

Audio

    Dialogue was always clear and easy to follow, with no lip-sync problems.

    There was nothing remarkable about the soundtrack, and in fact it sounds more clichéd than anything else, and is perfectly typical of what you might expect in a Disney production, being neither here nor there. Sometimes, it was not even particularly suited to the on-screen action, but on the whole it did its job satisfactorily. In it's favour, the front soundstage was very wide and detailed which was pleasing, though the sound did have a slightly thin character, which might be due to the compression.

    This is a very frontal mix, with very little surround activity at all. In fact, it is one of the lightest surround mixes I have heard in a while.

    Surprisingly, there is quite a lot of low frequency sound in the mix, and the sub was quite happy to join in with the other front three speakers. The score was also aided by the subwoofer at times, and was used as a "let's create some tension" device for the more PG oriented times in the film.

Menu

    The video is superb at times, but let down by too much MPEG artefacting for my liking.

    The audio is plain and functional, with nothing remarkable to comment on.

    No extras at all.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall