Recently I watched Disney’s Peter Pan, the digitally remastered version. I was really disappointed in how it looked. The idea behind remastering such a film is so that the audience will be able to see the bright brilliant colors and details in the animation. What appears to have happened with this production is simply running it through a computer program to spit out the updates. The Characters are nice a bright, colors all digitally remastered to be top-notch, but no modifications it appears to have been done to the background, making it look disjointed.
To add to this illusion that the characters are no longer setting the background is the random appearance of thick stroke lines around the characters, produced by a software or animator to indicate the edges of the character to recolor. Sometimes these lines will be sublet other times, typically on Wendy’s hair there will be the presence of a thick black outer stroke, but only on the hair for example.
Another nit-picky comment I’d like to make is the focus. It seems to make everything crisp and clear they removed blurs from the animation. For the most part, it’s not a big deal, but there is one scene where they are flying off to Neverland, and Wendy is drawn without a face. The original animation incorporated a blur for objects, not in the foreground so Wendy’s face wouldn’t be visible anyway, but now that the blur doesn’t exist it is very obvious that a face was not placed on her.
All in all, I feel a bit cheated by this remastered version, it doesn’t seem as good as the original, despite the fact that the colors are brighter and more clear. Sometimes I think studios are remastering classics just cause they can, not because they do anything for the quality of the film.
