Earlier in the week saw the domestic release of the Blu-ray of An American In Paris, as gorgeous a disc as you’ll ever see. I’m reviewing it for Sound + Vision so I’ve got to limit my comments here. Just go and get it. An amazing picture and some very nice extras—including one of my favorite MGM Avery’s, Symphony In Slang. Which, rather inexplicably, turns up on this otherwise impeccable disc in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, as opposed to its original 1.33. A small thing, I know. But a pertinent reminder of human fallibility. Not that the reframing harms any of the cartoon’s wonderful gags, including a “cat got your tongue?” answer that’s so nice they use it twice.
Seen in the cartoon itself, this is a great example of how limited animation can be used to enhance comic effect. The picture literally cuts from the cat having a forlorn expression to the impish tongue-holder, with a little “ding” on the soundtrack. The lightning-fast shift of demeanor is thoroughly hilarious. But that’s Avery for you.
UPDATE: In the comments, Pete Apruzzese notes that some of the extras on the American in Paris Blu-ray are standard-def, unenhanced for widescreen TVs. Which means that the 1.33:1 feature will play in its proper aspect ratio with your monitor in the 16:9 setting, but the 1.33:1 cartoon will get stretched, and look as it does above. Reset the monitor to the 4:3 setting, and you get the proper image ratio, like so:
Now I’m not gonna say that every extra on a Blu-ray disc needs to be high-def (ought to be, maybe), but if you’re going to throw standard def material in the mix, it wouldn’t hurt to have in 16:9 enhanced so you could watch everything on the disc without changing settings. I call this an unforced error on the producer’s part. I also wanted an excuse to run another cat/tongue image…
Alas,the Blu American is not yet available from Netflix.
Glenn -
Your screen shots look like the cartoon image is stretched to the sides rather than cropped. A couple of online reviews of the AiP Blu Ray state that the cartoon is a standard-def transfer presented in 480i. If that’s the case then I think what you’re seeing is your monitor stretching the interlaced image to fit the screen (or your BD player). You might want to check the settings on the monitor or player, some will automatically ‘fill the screen’ via stretching when they get an interlaced signal. My Panasonic Blu player was stretching out the SD/interlaced extras on the 1951 Day the Earth Stood Still Blu ray, a simple setting change fixed it.
I agree that as much content as possible on BDs should be presented in HD, but your request that any standard def content (480i or 480p) be 16:9 enhanced would actually produce a lower resolution image on 1.33:1 content than presenting it the way “Symphony” is shown on the AMERICAN IN PARIS Blu-ray. This is because standard definition encoding uses a native 1:33:1 image comprised of a grid of pixels measuring 720×480 (the pixels aren’t square, which is why you get 1.33:1 instead of a 1.5:1).
Content on standard def DVDs that’s 16:9 enhanced omits the letterbox bars at the top and bottom of the picture creating an image that uses the entirety of the 720×480 grid, basically filling a 1.33:1 frame with a 1.78:1 image. This image, of course, is stretched taller than the native source and then your DVD player or TV unstretches it to fill the entirety of your 16:9 television. This is not unlike the process of shooting a 2.4:1 movie anamorphically, filling the entirety of the negative with a vertically stretched image that becomes unstretched via a special projector lens.
If 1.33:1 content were encoded 16:9 enhanced in 480i or 480p, that would require “pillar boxing” the image with black bars on the sides of the encode so that when the content becomes “unstretched” to fill your TV, it displays correctly. (Similar to the third picture you’ve posted above.) The problem here would be that one quarter of your horizontal picture information would be wasted on the black bars, producing an overall lower resolution image, using only 540 of the available 720 horizontal lines of resolution on true content.
Hence, in our unperfect world, the best way to present 1.33:1 content in 480i or 480p on a BD is to encode to the content “full screen” (remember both 480i and 480p are native 1.33:1 formats) and then produce the pillarboxing effect on your TV as you’ve done above. The drawback, of course, is that this requires the end user to be smart enough to know when to engage the pillarboxing function on his/her TV manually, which is a dicey situation at best, but still, from a videophile perspective, presenting 1.33:1 material “full screen” is the way to go.