20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is a classic Jules Verne novel, adapted by Disney into the 1954 feature film, staring Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Paul Lukas and Peter Lorre, directed by Richard Fleischer and written by Earl Fenton. Since the film is not on Blu-ray yet (note: in 2019 Disney Movie Club released a Blu-ray version of this movie – I’ll cover this at the end), and has apparently undergone a restoration at 4k, I thought I’d take a look at the 1080p iTunes HD version that appears to be the new restored version.
Cable removal in the ‘restored’ version of Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. To the left of the frame, one must have snuck up close to the camea. Also note the artifacting, and boosted brightness levels.
So some discussion elsewhere suggests that one of the features of the ‘restored’ (Always a bad sign when you start using the enemy’s terminology) version is removal of the cables during the battle-with-the-squid sequence. Now this particular sequence is probably the technical low-point of the movie, cables are visible on the DVD version in about a quarter of the shots. The DVD pushed the scene quite dark, which helped reduce the visibility of some of the cables.
Now – I’m not opposed to cable removal per se… equally – redoing optical effect composites digitally is acceptable. But I would prefer the option of ‘as well as’ not ‘instead of’. The cable removal in this case doesn’t seem to do much harm, and I can still see the occasional cable, so it’s been done selectively. Now onto my bête noire: did they recolor it?
DVD vs iTunes 1080p comparison, note the tealing of everything in this underwater shot from Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Welllllll: yes. Not so much at the orange-end, but mostly at the teal-end. Basically everything underwater has been painted in a single teal-y hue. The opening titles have been teal boosted, some of the stock footage has been teal-ed up, where as some stock footage that was tinted in the DVD is presented without tint. In one small scene near the beginning where Peter Lorre was sea-sick in a storm. For reasons best known to whatever colorist happened to on be on duty at the video barn, they decided to stick a secondary color correction on him to make him ‘more’ sea-sick. Because you know: Peter Lorre couldn’t sell being sea sick…
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. iTunes on top. Peter Lorre only sea-sick in the DVD version has apparently joined the ranks of the un-dead in the new 4K restoration.
It’s not all bad news. Aside from a few random, senseless changes, the majority of the film appears to be faithful to the previous DVD version. Below is a typical example of a scene with a lot of browns and blues that could have gone orange and teal – but didn’t. Some additional work has been done to correct some of the distortion introduced by early anamorphic camera lens, resulting in a slight shift in framing. I actually prefer the framing on the new version in this case.
Nemo in his office, surprisingly restrained here with respect to color changes, note the slightly tweaked aspect ratio with a little more on the top, left and right, with a little off the bottom.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – iTunes 1080p Review
So back to the technical stats of the iTunes version. The 1080p iTunes download is 4.3GB with an average bitrate of 4.2 Mbps, with a peak bitrate of 15Mbps. Aspect ratio is approximately 2.54:1. Total runtime is 2:07:03.
Audio is provided by two tracks, a Stereo AAC track with an average bitrate of 135kbps, and a 5.1 Dolby Digital track at 384kbps.
Video quality is good during most scenes, however there is noticeable artifacting during the dreaded Squid-attack. At an overall rate of 4Mbps H.264 simply can’t allocate enough bits to make the scene play smoothly, which is a shame.
Conclusions
If you are holding your breath for the Blu-ray release of the 4K remastered version, you’ve died of asphyxiation in vain. The remastering gives a selective teal-ing to certain scenes, and randomly mucks around with other scenes. About the only positive thing is that It’s not as bad as it could be.
A Blu-ray release would likely fix the artifacting, but I suspect the teal-ing is here to stay.
In conclusion: Poor: 2 out of 5. If you are curious about what the Blu-ray will look like, then it’s worth a rental. But otherwise the iTunes 1080p edition of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is too teal-ed and too artifact-y to recommend.
2019 Disney Movie Club Blu-ray Update
As suspected it’s the same transfer as the iTunes edition, which means teal-y in places. The compression artifacting is much improved, but not entirely eliminated. Grainy underwater sequences and monster attacks are likely quality constrained by bit-rate, and pixel peepers may find this objectionable. Maybe a 100GB 4K version will be less artifacty ?
If you are a fan of the movie – it’s worthwhile upgrade.
FTC Disclosure: I am an iTunes affiliate advertiser, this means that if you click on one of the links above, I get a very small amount of money.