7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Product for Animation and Boris Karloff fans, March 29, 2005
This review is from: Extreme Fairy Tales: The Emperor's Nightingale (DVD)
i wanted to tell everyone about this product since we are the people who produced it. I am using my wifes Amazon account to post this.
We have taken some of the greatest classic cartoons ever produced, from some of the greatest animators in history, and meticulously added hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars of detailed restoration to both the sound and images in order to make them look as good as they did the day they were first released. Each cartoon is digitally processed first through photo shop frame by frame, and then using both the Davinci and the new Pogo systems to remove every scratch, line, dropout and artifact possible. We then we do a full color restoration at Technicolor using the original color palates to match the colors, tones and shades. We then digitally clean up the sound track to remove all the hiss and scratches and carefully add new foley sound effects, ambience and digitally remix them back onto the cartoons.
The result is our animated DVD series which is currently distributed in both the United States and Canada by Goodtimes Entertainment. These fully restored, full motion, color animations have not been seen in this condition since their original theatrical release. Sit back and be amazed and enjoy some of the finest and funniest animation ever made.
thats why were to only studio doing these that have the blessing and participation of Fleischer Studios and the only one to receive the prestigious Gold Medal from the Classic Animation Preservation Society.
I highly recomend this product to any lovers of classic animation.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Inept production shreds the heart of a potentially breathtaking story, December 15, 2011
This review is from: Extreme Fairy Tales: The Emperor's Nightingale (DVD)
For several years, I've been haunted by the notion that Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's Nightingale is one of the most powerful stories ever told--and one that becomes more salient with each passing day, as the human race destroys more of the biosphere, converting living nature into dead artifacts and waste. If that proposition has any truth at all, this fable should have been, over the years, quite an inspiration for animators. Searching for an animated telling, I came across this disc, and I've just viewed it.
I regret to inform you that this disc will have value only to the nerdiest of collectors--and definitely not to anyone who loves Andersen's moving story. If you must collect every stop-motion animation ever filmed, get the disc. If you have a kinky obsession with narrator Boris Karloff, get the disc. Or if you need to collect all the films produced in Czechoslovakia, get the disc. Otherwise, you won't even be able to give it away to the kids next door, because, let's face it, Coraline it ain't!
The film's most successful aspect is the elegant diction of narrator Boris Karloff. He could easily have given this film a soul, had he been given a better script. The original score, which evidently aspired to be an equal partner in storytelling, is the usual trite-1960s-semiclassical-kidmovie-score, and only at the end, does a violin solo rise halfway to the goal of conveying the beauty of the Nightingale's song. The stop-motion animation is professional-quality, but nothing to write home about. The puppet design is borderline cheap and cheesy, and the sets are even more so. But the script--which should have been the most important asset--is the most disappointing aspect of this gritty production.
Andersen's fairy tale is about the enormous toll of human infidelity, and our infatuation with the sensational, the artificial, and the flashy. It's actually as potent a cautionary about the way we treat our loved ones as it is about the way we treat the beauty of the natural world ("paved paradise, put up a parkin' lot," crooned Joni Mitchell). Unfortunately, this production invents a live-action frame about a spoiled but deeply repressed boy and his need to break the rules. The fairy tale then assumes the role of his psychological struggle to be free from parental regulation. The very heart of Andersen's tale is thus shredded in the garbage disposal, and instead we are offered a simplistic rant about regimentation. After pondering how this terrible mistake came to be, it seems that the most likely explanation is that in its day, the film must have represented a very timid, though very topical, protest against a totalitarian state. We tried to stave off boredom by inventing a gay subtext for the campy storytelling, but even that got old. Speaking of campy, the disc also contains some ancient Iwerks toons. We viewed a couple of these, but they also grew surprisingly tiresome.
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