Prompted by the discussions re the Snow White ratio question, I wondered if anyone had got this new release?
On the second disc, the film has been presented in something called 'Smilebox', which appears to be an attempt to give the film that 'wraparound' experience that you would have experienced if you had watched the film in a cinema in original Cinerama.
The film was made in the Cinerama process, which means it was filmed using 3 seperate cameras, and the three images are joined together. Obviously you get a far larger picture, though one downside is that the joins between the three frames of film were often very visible during daylight scenes.
The recent DVD's and the Blu Ray have cleaned this 'join' up somewhat, so it is less distracting.
But the 'Smilebox' presentation is...rather strange. I can see what they were trying to do, and indeed it does give the effect of being in a cinema with the huge screens wrapped around you...but it does it slightly too well, because it's as though you were sitting in the front row, so items in the foreground appear huge, and those in the background look miles away. It's a kind of 'warping' effect, in a way.
Also, if you were to be unkind, you could just say that the picture just looks like they have taken two bites out of the top and bottom of the screen, and it just looks like a convex shaped picture and is just unnatural.
It is an interesting presentation, but I am not sure it entirely works.
There is a documentary on the disc on the process, so I will check that out too.