The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney) [USA Mzo 12, MX 22]

[juanonimo]

Blu-ray review
Movie 3.5
Video 3.5
Audio 4.0
Extras 2.0
Overall 3.5

Video Quality The Hunchback of Notre Dame 4/5
For all the beauty and stunning animation on display, The Hunchback of Notre Dame's 1080p/AVC-encoded video transfer has a few issues worth noting. Banding and artifacting appear from time to time (although rarely to any debilitating degree, minus the skies behind Frollo during Phoebus' near-execution), aliasing graces a handful of shots and darker scenes are at odds with the presentation's contrast leveling. Still, the good far outweighs the bad, making any mishap in the image an easily overlooked deformity. Colors are warm and vibrant, with bold primaries, rich purples and golds, and deep blacks. Detail is excellent too. The animators' line art is crisp and clean on the whole, the brushstrokes and textures of the hand-painted backgrounds are wonderfully resolved, and the CG elements fare well, even under high definition scrutiny. Moreover, significant macroblocking, crush, noise and other anomalies are either kept to a bare minimum or nowhere to be found, and most scenes come within a hair's breadth of perfection. The studio's technical encode isn't as proficient as other Disney Animation Blu-ray presentations, but it's close enough to earn respectable marks.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a worthy addition to any Disney Animation collection. It's flawed, yes. But it has too much to offer to allow a few chatty gargoyles and cringe-inducing gags to spoil one of the later Disney Renaissance's best films. The Hunchback of Notre Dame II is not a worthy sequel, though. Direct-to-video or no. Lazy and tiresome, it hobbles along for a ghastly hour before throwing in the towel and rolling credits. Thus the marketing genius of the 2-Movie Collection, which saddles the good with the bad. Fortunately, both trips to Notre Dame are blessed with strong AV presentations, even if special features are few and far between. So add this one to your cart for The Hunchback of Notre Dame alone, treat the sequel as an extra and reap the singular reward.