Bambi Signature Collection Blu-ray review

Jun 19, 2017- Permalink

To celebrate the movie’s 75th anniversary, Disney has released the classic Bambi in a Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD combo pack. In a day and age when far too many films are being reimagined or simply remade, it’s great to see loving attention paid to a classic. The main movie’s presentation (video and audio) is the same as the Blu-ray released in 2011, but several new extras have been added to make this a member of Disney’s Signature Collection releases.

The disc’s 1080p AVC encoded transfer is in a 1.35:1 aspect ratio, only slightly off the original’s 1.37:1 ratio. The restoration work here is simply breathtaking and it’s hard to believe that they were working with original materials from 1945. The forest landscape has natural colours whether it’s in the green foliage of the summer and fall or winter’s cold whites and grays. The black levels are nice and deep and contrast is top-notch. The line art of this hand-drawn animation is clean and crisp. There also doesn’t appear to be any digital transfer issues like artifacts or banding. Simply put, it’s a wonderful video presentation.

On the audio side of things we get an English DTS-HD HR 7.1 track, a Dolby Digital 2.0 track of the film’s original audio presentation and French and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks. Subtitles are available in English SDH, French, and Spanish. The work to put the origanal soundtrack into the ambient surround of a 7.1 track is admirable and given the source material they’ve done quite well moving some elements into the surround a low frequency channels.

Though the audio and video presentation is the same as the 2011 Blu-ray release, for the Signature Collection release there are some new extras and three missing extras from the 2011 release. The video presentation includes three ways to watch the film: the Original Theatrical Edition, a Disney View version that has artwork on the sidebars, and a Inside Walt’s Story Meetings: Extended Edition that presents the film alongside filmed storyboard meetings with Walt and his team. The extras include archival clips, deleted scenes, an Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short, and a variety of featurettes.

If you already own the 2011 Blu-ray release, you don’t really need to pick this one up, but if Bambi is not in your home theatre library, this is a must-have.