Wow. I watched Alice last night. I have no idea what I was seeing. There were so many weird digital anomalies that I've never seen on a bluray before. The color balances are all messed up. The colors of the characters are massively boosted, but the backgrounds aren't as much. So if you use saturation to tame the characters, the backgrounds would go flat. The hues seemed like they had all been shifted to primaries by the boosting too. There was no variety in hues. The backgrounds were rock solid video freezes, but the characters still had film weave, so there was a subtle jitter to the animation. On top of that, the hyper sharpening has made the lines shimmer a bit from frame to frame. Disney was always famous for the accuracy of their inking. But the lines here jiggle all over. The textures were completely smoothed over on a ton of the backgrounds, and in a multiplane shot the whole scene went blurry with super concentrated grain smoothing, then snapped back to sharpness in the static shot that followed. A friend who was watching it with me said that he could see the aliasing around the lines change color in one scene, and I thought I saw a fast pan strobe.
But by far, the weirdest thing was the way every single one of the optical effects had been replaced by digital ones. There was a scene where the camera looks down into water and the ripple glass had been replaced by some sort of high contrast whispy remnant. A lot of the fades which had been timed to have slow ins or outs were replaced by completely evenly timed ones. And all of the double exposed effects like smoke were redone with sharpened edges and a weird sort of digital opacity. I can't even describe the problems with the opticals in words. I'll have to watch this a few more times and figure it out.
I have to agree that this is something entirely different than the original film... A digital hybrid. There isn't a name for what this is. Very strange.
