"The Land Before Time" on Netflix is a grainy mess....

First off let me say this...I love film. I love film grain. I deeply dislike excessive DNR.

That said, Don Bluth's 1988 animated film "The Land Before Time" that is on Netflix is a grainy disaster. It's the first time I've really been really bothered by Netfix's compression algorithms, which couldn't deal with the massive amount of grain during some of the faster sequences and basically just fell apart.

It looks something like 16mm on 70s-era film stock rather than a 35mm animated film from 1988. The colors are bright and the grain/picture is sharp so it seems like a somewhat recent transfer.

Another oddity is the end credits seem to be new. They are sitting on top of the picture and all that grain, free of any movement or grain themselves which tells me they're added digitally or at least electronically rather than optically.

The look is so intense that it would be right at home on a gritty NYC cop drama from that era and feel like part of the aesthetic. On an animated feature it's incredibly distracting.

Anyone have any complains about the BD or DVD? Has it always looked like this? It seems like could've been sourced from a copy or dupe neg, but even that doesn't explain the amount and coarseness of the grain.

As an aside, my 3.5-year-old daughter enjoyed it. I hadn't seen it in decades and it's held up pretty well, but the voice acting and comic relief aren't up to Disney standards and time has amplified that.

dan c

 

I actually just bought the original DVD and was surprised at how OLD the movie looked. It definitely had the look of a Seventies movie, very dark and grainy.

 

It's not great on Blu-ray either. Most of Don Bluth's movies seem to have very old transfers and little to no clean-up. The Secret of NIMH is one of my favorite animated films and the Blu-ray is merely passable. The best home media version of it but not as great as it could be

 

Yeah, grain management is a real thing, and one problem with HD and 4K is it resolves film grain in such a way as to make it absolutely pin-sharp. You could draw comparisons to audio, where if you have really great amplifiers and speakers, you can hear the flaws of the recording even better. There's no excuse for bad mastering, and they just have to work harder. The Land Before Time is owned by Universal, and you'd have to ask them as to why they didn't do a better job to reduce the grain. It's all doable provided you spend enough time and money at it.

One issue sometimes with film credits is that the relative brightness of the graphics is sometimes much, much too intense compared to the background. Sometimes we're better off if we get separate titles and separate background elements and then combine them as a composite. There are ways of doing this to where you almost can't tell any video was involved, but I can recall even going back to the 1990s that fans noticed that the titles on Raiders of the Lost Ark were done digitally and were not the original film titles. When the material isn't pin-registered carefully, it does look like the titles are sitting "on top" of the picture.

There's 2 or 3 ways to fix it, but again... time & money. (Skill, experience, good taste, and good judgement also help.)

 

I remember seeing this at the cinema when it came out, and it 'seemed' wonderful.
Even being younger I knew what graininess was after having heaps of dubbed VHS tapes.
I saw it at the drive in too, but can't remember it being a good or bad print.
I downloaded a copy of it at some point, and yeah, it was a rotten print and
not anything like I remembered.

 

I remember it looked pretty grainy and muddy in the theaters, too. I think it's in need of a full restoration but that's not likely to happen on a kids catalog title that they know will sell no matter how bad it looks.

 

Maybe it was when I saw it too, it would be good if others chimed in of their recollections of it in terms of quality.
There must be a decent copy of it, surely it was not filmed so badly...?...

 

It could be restored and look much better, yes. But that would cost money that I doubt Universal wants to spend.

 

Can you guys believe they made 13 sequels (and a TV series)?

 

I remember seeing a sequel, and found out later they made x amount more, and never saw any
of them.... I don't know if I could soldier my way through more than a couple these days haha!

 

The review on Blu-ray.com says the movie has never looked better.

A few reviews for the same Blu-ray on Amazon say it looks awful.

Might be worth the gamble for $10.

 

If I had a Blu-Ray Player I would be glad to spend $10 on the movie and I wouldn't really care if the transfer wasn't great.

 

Do you have the DVD? I wonder how the transfer is on it? Looks like there are special features on the DVD, while the BD is bare dinosaur bones.

 

I don't have the DVD (I don't have the movie on any format) but I hear the DVD image isn't that great- I've heard it compared to VHS.

 

I will have to look for either version used so my son can see it someday. I remember that I saw it in the theater, but don't remember too much about it except the Tyrannosaurus was called "Sharptooth".

 

Spoiler

Little Foot's Mom dies and it's really sad.

I saw it in the theaters and I remember really enjoying it. I really ought to see it again sometime soon.

 

Yeah, I should watch it myself and decide if he is old enough to handle it. He is only 3 right now. It is tough to know what will upset your kids when they have only just started watching movies.

 

That's a good idea. I would wait until he is about 6 or 7 but absolutely watch it yourself ahead of time. I seem to recall it has some pretty emotional moments and intense action scenes.

 

A number of factors come into play--1) lousy transfers 2) lousy source 3) lousy grain management. Sounds like this might have been a victim of all of the above. I think it's a nice little film and my kids enjoyed it but I haven't seen it in over a decade. Heck, they could have used the same source as they used for the DVD (or used the DVD and upscaled it for all I know), it's always a tough call but I'm sure if it was handled well, it could look much, much better.

 

Might also be enhancement in the TV set. This can add a pretty ugly edge to HD or 4K film transfers and actually make them grainier and nastier than they really are. I always recommend people shut off enhancement, noise reduction, and all the automatic controls just on the theory that a lot of these modes "hype" the picture and make it worse than it really is.

On the other hand: I reported some months back that the grain in Close Encounters on 4K HDR Blu-ray is about the size of canned hams, so even modern releases of historically important films from major studios sometimes go right off the rails. There are studio executives who are absolutely opposed to grain reduction of any kind on the basis that "grain is part of the film image," but the problem is, they don't necessarily have the technical understanding that high-res transfers tend to wind up being very grainy when you add contrast to it. It needs a little grain reduction just to not suck too much, and it's possible to leave it off most of the time when the image is bright and well-exposed.

 

-and this was all...before time!