Today is the big day, everybody! Ponyo arrives on Blu-Ray Disc, and Ponyo, Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, and Kiki's Delivery Service arrive on DVD. I'll definitely be picking up at least one today, possibly more, and I'll pass along my impressions later. Please do what you can to grab these movies this week.
The Ponyo DVD-plushie combo is available on Amazon, and I'd expect to find it at retailers. If I find one, I'll be extremely tempted to get a copy; that's going to be my go-to package for family. But the BD is definitely in my sights, as I'm sure it is for many of you. 2010 is going to be the year for Studio Ghibli Blu-Ray, and this is an excellent start.
6 comments:
i sure am tempted to get a copy of kiki to replace my current region 1 disk with the HIDEOUS cover. (definitely a contender in the ugly-cover-pointless-redesign stakes along with the troma totoro - and lots of others i'm unfamiliar with no doubt!)
there are no differences with the reissued DVDs right? or is the compression better or something?
We're not entirely sure. Castle in the Sky and Kiki's Delivery Service were from the first wave of Ghibli DVDs, having sat in Disney's vaults for a period of time before Spirited Away arrived in theatres and won an Oscar. The picture quality on those discs is notably inferior to the Japanese Region-2 DVDs. I've shown examples from Castle in the Sky here on the Ghibli Blog.
As for Totoro, I honestly don't know. The previous DVD looked perfectly fine, certainly as good as the R2 version, and better than the Hong Kong R3 (I bought that version some years ago). I wouldn't expect the standard-definition version to look any better.
It seems Disney is completely rebranding the Ghibli catalog, with the excellent new packaging - it really is spectacular, with all the gold trim. Hopefully, we'll see the rest of the catalog arrive soon (aside from Mononoke, which, without any Miramax label, will likely disappear from American shelves for good).
Here is a review of the new Kiki DVD.
http://ultimatedisney.com/kikisdeliveryservice.html
There is only a minor upgrade in the visual presentation.
On the plus side, there is much more in the way of bonus features. It's not a huge amount, but there are featurettes and a Japanese TV special.
Also, they fixed the opening/closing credits and put back in the original Japanese songs and credits. They also took out a line of dialog by Jiji near the end that changed the ending somewhat.
Got my Ponyo and Totoro dvds yesterday. Both certainly look nice. Havn't checked out any of the special features yet though. I got mine on amazon where they are doing the 10$ off with another ghibli dvd.
Gnickerson I'd love to know more about that line.
just taking out one line probably won't save it, but that's still very interesting
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