bcla
On our rugged Eastern foothills.....
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2012
Yeah, it being made for TV makes sense that it would be 1.78:1. I had the same experience too and I always wonder if our projectionist messed something up, though is that even really possible anymore with digital?
I also think it's weird that they did not advertise this or give any warning about it at all. A lot of people in my theater were confused, especially with the long run time. When the credits ran I heard a kid ask loudly "Was that the movie?" Obviously Disney was trying some kind of experiment here, but I would say the results show that they should keep the shorts around the usual 7 or so minutes and leave the half-hour stuff for another venue.
I think it's the first non-Pixar short that was released with a Pixar feature. I've read that it was scrapped from most Mexican showings of Coco after complaints.
The look was kind of strange, but I get why it looked like that if they shoehorned it into the file or print. I think some movie theaters still order film prints instead of digital files. From a technical standpoint I don't see why it couldn't have been done where it would properly fill up the screen, but they did what they did (which was effectively reverse letterboxing).
I was trying to find some article mentioning how the aspect ratio looked on screen, but couldn't find anything until I came across this:
https://www.thetoptens.com/worst-things-about-olaf-s-frozen-adventure/
This is another way to tell that this was meant to be a T.V. special. They didn’t even bother to fix the aspect ratio! It made it even harder to watch! It has an aspect ratio that’s made for being shown on T.V.. It just looks weird when watching it on a larger screen. They could’ve easily fixed it to make it more watchable. We’re just watching this small square image on a long screen! It doesn’t look good! I really wish they changed it.
This is another way to tell that this was meant to be a T.V. special. They didn’t even bother to fix the aspect ratio! It made it even harder to watch! It has an aspect ratio that’s made for being shown on T.V.. It just looks weird when watching it on a larger screen. They could’ve easily fixed it to make it more watchable. We’re just watching this small square image on a long screen! It doesn’t look good! I really wish they changed it.
And yes there are steps they could have taken to reprogram the sequences to match the aspect ratio. I remember years ago Pixar actually remastered several movies for a 1:33:1 aspect ratio video release. They would simply render it again with modifications to match the aspect ratio. They do all sorts of things including inserting different characters into scenes for different distribution (i.e. Cars 2) and could theoretically reanimate mouths to match different languages.