Hearsay - Sleeping Beauty at the Academy

As I noted elsewhere, I was not able to attend yesterday's first public screening of the newly restored print of Sleeping Beauty at the Academy. I have spoken with some of my dearest friends who attended, and I value their opinion greatly.

They found that the image was beautifully crisp, actually so much so that a few scenes seemed to be originally shot out of focus. Also, this restoration was made from the original three black and white Technicolor negatives, and there seemed to be some color variance, as some characters seemed to have slightly different colors from scene to scene. The fish that King Hubert fights with is beautifully blue, though, and when he put it back in his belt, it got a bigger laugh than ever before.

The sound was gorgeous, though for the cinema mixed by folks who are used to mixing realistic 5.1 mixes, while this film originally was produced with a kind of "fantasy stereo," a sort of caricature of real life sound. My friends recall the screening of the 1979 release (and following panel discussion which I believe included Frank, Ollie, Milt, Woolie and Marc!), and the mix there was more surrealistic. But the new mix is not bad per se, and the sound quality is amazing! The Once Upon a Dream number ended with a chord that they did not remember ever hearing...

Putting together a restoration of a Technicolor film with multichannel sound means making ethical decisions that are going to be based more on taste than on science, and with this in mind, my friends gave this restoration a "both thumbs up." Everyone will have things they would have done different, but in all, the new release seems to still be a good reason to finally invest in a Blu-Ray player! I for one am certainly looking forward to it - and also to seeing it in the cinema at the El Capitan later this year!