Beauty & the Beast (via Blu-Ray) - 9/10 - This is probably my second-favorite Disney animated movie of all time, but I hadn't seen it in years. As my folks didn't let me take their copy of the DVD with me when I left home, I eagerly scooped up the Blu-Ray of this movie today and it didn't disappoint. Disney is quite possibly the best studio currently producing Blu-Ray movies, and this set seems to be up to their usual standards. Simply put, there isn't a single flaw in this movie's Blu-Ray transfer. I don't think the movie looked this lush, this detailed in the theaters. It gives me a great deal of hope for the inevitable (hopefully soon) Blu-Ray for Lion King, my favorite Disney animated movie.
So where does the movie go wrong? Well, it doesn't really. This is one of those rare Disney movies I would truly describe with the cheesy description of "magical." The music's great, the animation (particularly on the Beast) is amazing even by modern standards, and the pacing's pretty tight...or at least it would be if Disney didn't feel the need to keep shoving the Imax extended cut down our throats. There are a lot of weird lighting, coloring, and detail changes made for the Imax version that crop up on both the theatrical and Special Edition cuts of the film on this disc. It's fine in general, but there are scenes where you just "remember" scenes being a lot darker by intention that are now substantially brighter and more colorful. My chief bone of contention with this cut of the film is the song "Human Again." I subscribe to the notion that deleted scenes are
cut for a reason, and "Human Again" is one song too many in a movie that is so stuffed with vocal numbers I'm not sure there's more than 5 minutes of actual dialogue in the whole film (it's really more of a Broadway musical that just happens to be animated than an animated movie). Dialog in "Human Again" also makes the timeline of the movie even more alarmingly short than it seemed already (if you believe "Human Again", at most this entire movie took place over
maybe a week). Sure, if you want you can just watch the theatrical cut and the song won't be there, but the aftermath of that scene (where the castle is bright and shiny for the rest of the movie) is intact in both versions of the film. So you can either watch a version that slams into a wall with a mediocre song, or you can watch a version with an annoying continuity error. Huh.
Overall, a great movie that's among the best that Disney ever did, but of course you already knew that. Now, if Disney will ever get around to releasing Lion King and Aladdin on Blu-Ray, I'll finally have all 3 of what I call the Holy Disney Trinity (yes yes...I know...I don't care much for Little Mermaid, though I respect what it did for Disney animation).
Oh, and Disney: thanks for having Lumiere babble at me incessantly while I'm trying to navigate yet another of your needlessly-complicated Blu-Ray menus. Why can't you just put all your extras under one big "Extras" menu and call it a day rather than scattering them all around the frickin' place?