The Sword in the Stone
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Synopsis
Take an amazing journey with a young orphan named "Wart" and the extraordinary wizard Merlin. According to legend, only someone with the purest character and inner strength can pull the enchanted sword from the stone and claim the throne of England. Armed with newfound confidence and the power of friendship, Wart discovers his destiny and learns the best magic is the kind you find inside yourself!
Picture 7/10
Disney’s The Sword in the Stone makes its Blu-ray debut with a 1080p/24hz high-definition transfer, presenting the film in its original aspect ratio of 1.75:1 on a dual-layer disc.
I haven’t seen the film since VHS, missing the DVD release, so I can’t speak as to how this compares to the original DVD edition. Looking at it, though, I do somewhat suspect that we’re simply getting the high-def version of that transfer.
As it stands the presentation is nice but that’s about it. Disney has yet again scrubbed away all film grain to create as clean an image as possible. As I’ve stated before I don’t object to this for their animated features as long as it doesn’t irrevocably harm the image. Here there is an ever-so-slight softness to the image, where the drawn lines do not look cleanly defined, blurring on the edges, with some of the “long shots” lacking a few details one would expect to be there (a face can become blurry for example.) But backgrounds still look to have their details, and you can also make out the rough drawing lines that seemed to be the stylistic choice of Disney films during this period. There isn’t a flaw to speak of in the print so Disney has given the source elements an extensive restoration (and wiped a lot away digitally I'm sure,) and the colours in the film are about as bright as expected (the film has a darker look) and perfectly saturated.
It’s fine, and I can’t really say anything truly bad about it, but on the other end there’s no reason for me to really sing its praises. It’s a generally good transfer of a 50-year old animated feature but the reality is the image could look sharper.
Audio 7/10
Disney includes a remastered DTS-HD MA 5.1 surround track, as well as a Dolby Digital 2.0 surround track. I stuck with the 5.1 track.
Sound quality is lively and robust with fantastic fidelity and range. But when you get down to it it’s really a mono track at heart, stereo at best. The surrounds get very little to do, handling some music and a few sound effects. I recall most of the audio sticking simply to the fronts and never doing anything truly creative.
Quality wise it’s great, but doesn’t really do much in terms of its mix.
Extras 4/10
I’m used to Disney loading their releases with supplements but this one is pretty bare, and the fact this is a dual-layer disc is unnecessary I’m sure.
The first supplement is new to this release, an alternate opening where Wart meets Merlin. I actually wish there was more info on this because this alternate opening suggests an entirely different picture. The original storyline seems to have made the witch Madam Mim (who only appears briefly during the climax of the film) had more of an integral part. As it turns out “Wart” is clearly defined as the missing heir to the phone and Mim and a Black Knight decide to search for him. The alternate opening has Mim’s raven chasing Wart around through the woods, where he is saved by Merlin. This then leads to a different sequence in his house. The opening is recreated from what I assume are original storyboards, animated and provided with voice over. As I’ve learned most of Disney’s films go through drastic changes during development of the story and I’m a little disappointed there wasn’t more on this here as it sounds the story originally took a fairly different path.
The remaining features appear to come from the DVD since they look to be all upscales of standard-definition content. The first item is Music Magic: The Sherman Brothers, which features interviews with Robert and Richard Sherman. This unfortunately dry feature, where the brothers kind of talk over one another, has the two talk about their work on the film’s music, specifically the nonsense words that appear in the songs in some cases (apparently because they wanted to give the music a “British sounding magic.”) They then go over songs that didn’t appear in the film. The feature runs 8-minutes.
We then get content from the archives excerpts from a 1963 Disney television episode of All About Magic, which features Disney himself visiting the “Magic Property Room” where Disney then shows some magical items (basically just cheap parlour tricks.) It’s a bit of a surreal segment, especially a bizarre moment where he shows a decapitated princess that comes to life. It can be a bit painful but a fascinating document none-the-less. It runs over 7-minutes.
We then get two short cartoons, first a 7-minute Goofy cartoon called Knight For a Day (which is one of those Goofy “educational” shorts covering sports,) followed by the 9-minute Mickey Mouse cartoon The Brave Little Tailor (where Mickey is mistakenly identified as a Giant killer and ends up facing off with one.) Though they have not been restored at all I like it when Disney digs up the classic cartoon shorts and hope they keep doing this with their releases.
We then get an option to sing along with the movie, which is nothing but subtitles playing during the musical segments, followed by Info on the disc. There’s also a code for the digital copy of the film.
And that’s it. Shockingly there’s very little, though most of it proves to be interesting.
Closing
The supplements are almost non-existent (at least we get a couple of classic shorts) and the transfer is adequate if nothing else. It comes with a recommendation for fans of the film, but really only if they can get it on sale.
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