Mickey Mouse in Living Color DVD set. Funky picture??

I have a lot of animation on DVD and a lot of it looks pretty good. But for some reason, my 'Mickey Mouse in Living Color' set looks funky.

I've noticed that the lines aren't solid, they're kind of wavey. I'm talking about the actual characters in most cases. For example, instead of solid, dark lines that make up Mickey Mouse, the lines are sort of soft and wavey. It's kind of hard to explain, but has anyone else noticed this? To me it's distracting. It occurs on both DVDs and on pretty much every cartoon.

Or.....I could be completely off my rocker.

 

Well, he is animated - maybe he's drawn that way.

Sorry. Couldn't resist. I have this set and haven't noticed anything peculiar, but i don't think i've watched it all. You do say that other animated DVDs look fine?

 

Yep. All my other animated DVDs are fine including the 'Silly Symphonies' set and the 'Fantasia' box set, 'Snow White,' etc.

I don't know what it is, but the lines just aren't solid on the Mickey set, it's really hard to explain. Maybe it's some sort of digital artifacting that is really inherent in my player. Haven't been able to view it elsewhere.

 

I thought I'd read something about this problem and after a few google searches I found some information here:

http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#1.20

Some people claim that animation, especially hand-drawn cell animation such as cartoons and anime, does not compress well with MPEG-2 or even ends up larger than the original. Other people claim that animation is simple so it compresses better. Neither is true.

Supposedly the "jitter" between frames caused by differences in the drawings or in their alignment causes problems. An animation expert at Disney pointed out that this doesn't happen with modern animation techniques. And even if it did, the motion estimation feature of MPEG-2 would compensate for it.

Because of the way MPEG-2 breaks a picture into blocks and transforms them into frequency information it can have a problem with the sharp edges common in animation. This loss of high-frequency information can show up as "ringing" or blurry spots along edges (called the Gibbs effect). However, at the data rates commonly used for DVD this problem does not usually occur.

 

Drew, thanks for investigating this!

That description sounds 'exactly' what I'm seeing on my 'Mickey Mouse In Living Color' DVDs. Of course, I do have a fairly early DVD player, purchased December 1999, so maybe this is a problem that isn't inherent on newer, or progressive scan DVD players?

My DVD player is an RCA model and one peculiarity is that I have 2 DVD copies of one of my guilty pleasure films, Disney's 'The Devil and Max Devlin.' Neither copy will play on my RCA but play perfectly on my friend's DVD player, or my computer. Since the disc was only $9.99, I had purchased another copy thinking the first one was defective.

Anyway, the problem with my Mickey Mouse Living Color DVD is a disappointment because it is distracting to me. Of course, my wife doesn't know what I'm talking about if I try to point the problem out to her.