AnimEigo continues to increase their ever
growing line of Toho-related titles, with this
being their most recent offering to date, having
been released "just" seven years prior
to theaters. Quality wise, this disc falls into
line with other releases from the company. There
is nothing particularly outstanding about it,
although nothing to be really disappointed with
either, unless one was expecting a more substantial
supplement presentation than the normal bare bones
selection found on the company's releases.
| Video: |
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Dora-Heita is not an easy film to rate
the video quality of. For those unfamiliar with
the movie, it does tend to have a unique look
under Kon Ichikawa's supervision, sporting a subtle
earthy brown type of filter to its color scheme
along with a faint glow. This makes it harder
to objectively judge the video quality, but far
from impossible. First off, the most notable flaw
of this transfer is simply signs of compression.
There are honestly a lot of pixilation through
out the movie, which is particularly noticeable
in any scenes with overly light or dark shades
that cause this to standout more. The movie also
looks a little soft on account of this, lacking
a rich degree of detail. The print used to make
the DVD looks to be in fantastic shape, though.
However, this particular disc does have a few
moments where the frame gets shaky, most notably
around the 18 minute mark. Overall, though, it
definitely does more right than wrong in the end.
Dora-Heita is presented in its original
aspect ratio of 1.85:1, and is Anamorphic for
widescreen TVs.
| Audio: |
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The DVD includes one audio track, which is
the original two channel stereo DTS presentation.
In terms of speaker distinction, it's a pretty
unimpressive audio offering with really no positive
examples to cite. However, it's not exactly a
surround track anyway, for that matter Dora-Heita isn't really the type of film that could make
a lot of use of the added audio depth, and the
stereo track included more than gets the job done.
As expected with this being a fairly recent production,
the track is devoid of overt inconsistencies as
well.
The audio can be accompanied by, removable, English
subtitles that are available in two options: the
first is for all audio and text, and the second
is for text in the film only. Like other discs
from the firm, the subtitles are color coded so
it's easy to tell when multiple characters are
speaking during the same scene.
| Extras: |
 |
Another AnimEigo release, another fairly light
selection of extras, although they do seem to
be, very marginally, improving over time. Like
just about all of their titles, this disc includes
the company's trademark Program Notes. Generally,
these were kind of a throwaway feature, unless
one was looking for a general background of the
time period. These, however, delve a little more
into aspects of the production, and explaining
particular elements of the movie, making it a
more worthwhile read. The disc also contains a
limited image gallery, which mainly features black
and white production stills, which in itself is
odd considering the film was only released seven
years ago. Rounding out the supplement material
is a selection of trailers to other Toho releases
from the company and teasers for Dora-Heita.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a fairly large
video error with the teasers, where in the feed
is anamorphic... despite the picture being very
obviously a full screen video track with the black
bars already set to the correct aspect ratio.
The result is a very
stretched image for the adverts.
| Overview: |
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Bottom
line, this isn't a spectacular release by any
stretch, but it's not at all a bad means of watching
the movie either. The video and audio quality
are really more than serviceable in the end, with
the only real weak spot of this release is the
lack of any real substantial extra feature.
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