Announcement
Collapse
No announcement yet.
Son Of The White Mare (Arbelos Films) Blu-ray Review
Collapse
X
Collapse
-
Son Of The White Mare (Arbelos Films) Blu-ray Review
Released by: Arbelos Films
Released on: June 8th, 2021.
Director: Marcell Jankovics
Cast: Gyí¶rgy Cserhalmi, Vera Pap, Gyula Szabí³, Ferenc Szalma
Year: 1981
Purchase From Amazon
Son Of The White Mare - Movie Review:
Directed by storied Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics, 1981's The Son Of The White Mare revolves around Treeshaker, the third son of a horse who, after drinking the horse's milk, grows fantastically strong. As he evolves, he hears stories of the events that brought about the end of his father's reign at the hands of an evil dragon-man.
When the white mare passes away, Treeshaker decides to seek out and eliminate the dragons who have since taken over the entire planet. He teams up with his two equally powerful brothers - Stonecrumbler and Irontemperer - to find a portal to the dragons' underworld home, taking up residence in a giant hollowed out tree where they run into trouble with a local gnome. When they find the entrance to the underworld, Treeshaker heads in alone to find that the dragons have held some princesses hostage. The brothers save the princesses and befriend them but eventually Treeshaker winds up stuck in the underworld…
A strange and very psychedelic kaleidoscope of a film, Son Of The White Mare is a seriously strange film and a completely engrossing viewing experience. The animation style employed by Jankovics and his team is truly wild, simplistic in its style but remarkably complex in its different compositions. There's near-constant movement on the screen and not just with the characters in the foregrounds but in the backgrounds as well, the movie is a swirling trip as characters and their world swirl about in what almost feels like a never ending dance of sorts. It's all very fluid in its approach to visual storytelling, and it's completely engrossing.
Admittedly, without knowing a whole lot about Hungarian animation or Hungarian fairy tales, it's tough to go into too much depth or detail about how this version of the story might compare to others but this unique cultural slant is hardly a detriment. Rather, it winds up lending the movie a fairly exotic feel that goes a long way towards making it as interesting as it is. Thematically it isn't so far off from standard English fairy tales but stylistically this is very much its own thing.
Son Of The White Mare - Blu-ray Review:
Arbelos Films brings Son Of The White Mare to Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer taken from a “new 4K restoration from by original camera negative by the Hungarian National Film Institute - Film Archive in collaboration with Arbelos.†Framed in its original 1.37.1 aspect ratio, the transfer gets 21GBs of space on the 50GB disc and it looks fantastic. Detail is as strong as the original animation will allow and the colors are reproduced beautifully. There's plenty of natural film grain but almost no print damage to note at all. The presentation always looks wonderfully film-like, there are no issues with any noise reduction, edge enhancement or compression artifacts.
The 24-bit DTS-HD 1.0 track, in the film's original Hungarian language, sounds very good. The levels are balanced and the track is clean, there are no problems with any hiss, distortion or sibilance. The optional English subtitles are clean and easy to read.
Brighter Colors is a new thirty-four-minute video interview with Marcell Jankovics wherein he goes over how he got into filmmaking while his native Hungary was still a communist country and how that political environment and a series of social and cultural traits had an effect on how his work has turned out over the years, especially Son Of The White Mare.
Certainly worth mentioning here is the Early Works section that contains some of the director's earlier efforts. In this section you'll find the three-minute Sisphys from 1974, the three-minute The Struggle from 1977 and a nine-minute Air India commercial made in 1968. The disc also includes the seventy-nine-minute feature Jí¡nos vitéz, also known as Johnny Corncob, from 1973, which is also taken from a new 4k restoration. It's an interesting story based on a Hungarian folk story about a young shepherd and it's a beautifully animated mix of adventure, humor, romance and suspense. These are all very interesting to see and add a lot of value to the disc.
A quick four-minute archival making of documentary called The Making Of Johnny Corncob, made in 1973, features some insight from the director on making the film.
Rounding out the extras on the disc are a U.S. theatrical trailer, menus and chapter selection. The disc comes packaged with a nice full-color booklet that contains extensive writing on the film by Eleanor Cowen and Charles Soloman.
Son Of The White Mare - The Final Word:
Son Of The White Mare is a pretty wild experience, a seriously psychedelic animated trip unlike anything you've seen before. Arbelos Films has done an excellent job bringing this to Blu-ray with a gorgeous presentation and a host of extra features. Highly recommended!
Posting comments is disabled.
Categories
Collapse
article_tags
Collapse
- album review (218)
- album reviews (274)
- arrow video (272)
- blu-ray (3225)
- blu-ray review (4162)
- comic books (1392)
- comic reviews (872)
- comics (988)
- dark horse comics (484)
- dvd and blu-ray reviews a-f (1969)
- DVD And Blu-ray Reviews G-M (1711)
- DVD And Blu-ray Reviews N-S (1757)
- DVD And Blu-ray Reviews T-Z (878)
- dvd review (2513)
- idw publishing (216)
- image comics (207)
- kino lorber (391)
- movie news (260)
- review (318)
- scream factory (279)
- severin films (300)
- shout! factory (537)
- twilight time (269)
- twilight time releasing (231)
- vinegar syndrome (497)
Latest Articles
Collapse
-
Released by: Kino Lorber
Released on: February 22nd, 2022.
Director: Gianfranco Parolini
Cast: Lee Van Cleef, Jack Palance
Year: 1976
Purchase From Amazon
God’s Gun – Movie Review:
Directed by Gianfranco Parolini in 1976, quite late in the spaghetti western boom years, God's Gun (Diamante Lobo in Italy) introduces us to a bad, bad man named Sam Clayton (Jack Palance) who, along with his gang of equally bad, bad men, start wreaking...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 12:10 PM -
-
Released by: Kino Lorber
Released on: October 8th, 2019.
Director: Mario Bava
Cast: Christopher Lee, Reg Park, Leonora Ruffo, Gaia Germani
Year: 1968
Purchase From Amazon
Hercules In The Haunted World – Movie Review:
Directed by Mario Bava in 1961 and featuring a screenplay by Bava (and Sandro Continenza, Francesco Prosperi and Duccio Tessari), Hercules In The Haunted World (also known as Hercules At The Center Of The Earth and...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 12:08 PM -
-
Released by: Cinématographe
Released on: March 26th, 2024.
Director: Jack Nicholson
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Mary Steenburgen, Christopher Lloyd, John Belushi
Year: 1978
Purchase From Amazon
Goin’ South – Movie Review:
Made at the height of his career as an actor, 1978’s ‘Goin’ South’ sees Jack Nicholson once again in the director’s chair, seven years after his directorial debut, ‘Drive, He Said,’ failed to set the...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 10:29 AM -
-
Released by: Radiance Films
Released on: April 20th, 2024.
Director: Noburo Nakamura
Cast: Miyuki Kuwano, Mikijiro Hira
Year: 1964
Purchase From Amazon
The Shape Of Night – Movie Review:
Directed by Noburo Nakamura for Shochiko in 1964, ‘The Shape Of Night’ follows a young woman named Yoshie Nomoto (Miyuki Kuwano). In the opening scene, she’s working as a streetwalker on the outskirts of town and soon enough, she’s picked...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 10:26 AM -
-
Released by: Film Masters
Released on: April 23rd, 2024.
Director: Bert I. Gordon
Cast: Richard Carlson, Juli Reding, Lugene Sanders, Susan Gordon
Year: 1963
Purchase From Amazon
Tormented – Movie Review:
The late Bert I. Gordon’s 1963 horror film, ‘Tormented,’ is an effectively spooky ghost story made with an obviously low budget but no less effective for it.
The story revolves around a professional piano player...-
Channel: Movies
04-17-2024, 10:19 AM -
-
Released by: Grindhouse Releasing
Released on: March 12th, 2024.
Director: William Grefé
Cast: William Shatner, Jennifer Bishop, Ruth Roman, Harold Sakata
Year: 1974
Purchase From Amazon
Impulse – Movie Review:
Directed by the one and only William Grefé, 1974’s Impulse is one of those rare films that allows you to witness what it would be like if a really sweaty William Shatner got mad at a lady carrying balloons. Before that...-
Channel: Movies
04-15-2024, 01:20 PM -