Memories Rewatched

1. Disney's Beauty And The Beast 3D
2. Nobita's New Great Adventure Into The Underworld

So recently we've relived some old memories. Just the other day The Chief bought tickets for Beauty And The Beast 3D, which got us all excited as we weren't aware that it was screening then.

We never did get to watch The Lion King 3D that screened earlier somehow. We were aware that it was going to be out in the cinemas, but somehow we totally missed it. But for Disney's Beauty And The Beast 3D? No way.

You know, the first version of Beauty And The Beast that we ever knew of portrayed Beauty as having 2 other selfish sisters, a merchant father who got lost and found his way to a castle, stays the night and as he was leaving the following day plucks a rose from the garden for Belle only to be confronted by the Beast...

...Wikipedia has the story. Yeah, it's the same one right down to the bit where her sisters rub their eyes with onions to fake crying. There's no Gaston, no animated household furniture, no songs.

Disney changed that all right. We actually recall that we bought the cassette tape of the soundtrack even before we got to watch the movie. Knew the songs by heart. Then we borrowed the VHS tape from Randall and was wowed.

We think we had more impact from the soundtrack compared to the movie. Even after Beauty And The Beast, it was the soundtrack cassette tapes that we bought instead of the VHS tape of the movie for Aladdin and The Lion King. By the time Pocahontas came along we've made the slow switch to CDs (they weren't considered cheap then at nearly RM50 a disc!).

Gosh. The soundtrack. We'd that tape plugged into our Walkman playing so much we're surprised the tape lasted all the torture we've put it through. Fast forward. Rewind. Fast forward. Switch to side B, more fast forwarding and rewinding. We found out that the soundtrack was a stereo recording when our earphones weren't plugged in properly and we were surprised when half the townsfolk in "Belle" couldn't be heard at all, we thought there was something wrong with our tape!

Even though we've watched it again on DVD (last recollection was in Glasgow, the extended version with "Human Again" included), we always remember the scenes as though we were watching the blurry VHS version. Until we watched the 3D version.

Oh wow.

The feeling was the same as when we first made the switch to contact lenses. Everything bright and clear as we walked down Argyll Street!

The stained glass at the prelude depicting the story of the Prince transforming into the Beast!

And in 3D!

Somehow we were reminded of our 3DS, where the 3D effect was seen by a sense of depth rather than things popping out of the screen. And with such clarity. Made us want to run out and buy the 3D Blu-Ray version after the movie!

Well, so far we've resisted from buying the Blu-Ray due to the fact that we haven't a Blu-Ray player nor a 3D tv.

As for Doraemon, we admit that we had grown out of it a long time back. We admit, we used to watch the BM-dubbed cartoons (known for its high-pitch voice acting) and bought the BM-subbed comics. Asides from the short stories, there were the longer adventures that took up an entire book, featured a fair number of gadgets and had fantastic plot lines as compared to the mundane everyday setting as found in the short stories. Also perhaps we enjoyed it more because there was no "moral to the story" as found in the short stories.

The one we enjoyed most was Nobita's Great Adventure Into The Underworld, dealing with magic and demons.

So we got to watch the 2007 movie remake of that story, and we're actually surprised at ourself for not watching the original movie. Still, we remembered bits and pieces of the manga and were pleasantly surprised that the remake had great artwork and animation (like Doraemon's reactions when he sees a mouse!).

There were some changes that makes us want to get the book to read through again, just to see what they've removed and/or added.

The funny thing is, the DVD only has the cartoon in either Chinese (which we have limited comprehension) or Malay. In Malay, the translation is fine (although we're a bit puzzled at certain names like Lampu Moonlight and Bintang Devil instead of a full Malay translation), but we're somewhat disappointed by the expressions of the voice acting. Japanese anime tend to be rather extremely expressive and the voice acting here seems only half there to us. It's good, but could be better.

If we had the option we would have watched the show in Japanese with English subs. Perhaps somewhere out there there's a version of the DVD with exactly just that (we're not sure if we're ready for an English subbed version of Doraemon, though...).

Oh well. Now to wait for Disney to release The Little Mermaid in 3D!