The Collected Works of Hayao Miyazaki

Amazon.com will release a package of 11 Miyazaki features in Blu-ray for $224.99 on November 17, 2015.  No listing yet on Amazon.ca.  Apparently, versions of this box have already been released in Japan, Europe and Australia.  The link has more details.

Shifting Distribution Patterns

The world of film distribution is changing.  What we take for granted, and have for years, may soon no longer be the case.  Movies open in theatres.  Three months later, they're on DVD.  Then they move to pay TV and finally free TV.

Theatre audiences in the U.S. and Canada are shrinking.  Hollywood has compensated for this by raising prices, so that the overall theatrical grosses go up while the number of people buying tickets goes down.  Last summer was a disappointment in that everything went down.  Deadline Hollywood reports that the summer movie season ended with grosses in the U.S. and Canada down 2.8% over last summer and the number of tickets sold dropped 4.3%.  And that was with a rise in ticket prices of 1.5%.

Just like studios have gone to digital projection as a way to cut their distribution costs, they're now shifting to downloads to cut their costs on DVD manufacture and distribution.  DVD sales have gone down in recent years, so the move to downloads is a way to increase the profit when people pay to see the movie at home.  Variety reports (and the article is behind a paywall):

In a first for the studio, 20th Century Fox is making Ridley Scott's sci-fi thriller "Prometheus" available for HD download Sept. 18, three weeks before the release of the physical discs.

Pic marks the inaugural film in Fox's strategy of carving out a new digital window for homevid releases. Studio will make all of its films available for HD download about two weeks before the titles hit store shelves. The three-week jump for "Prometheus" window is an exception. The next few pics in Fox's queue are "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," "Ice Age: Continental Drift" and "Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days."

And the digital versions will be cheaper: Retailers will offer the digital version of "Prometheus" for less than $15, rather than the $20 they usually offer films through the electronic-sell-through category.

On the day of "Prometheus'" launch, the studio will also make 600 of its library titles available through the new service. Those include mainstream movies like "Avatar" and "Rio," but also less readily available DVD fare like the original 1968 version of "Planet of the Apes" and "French Connection." The price point for the studio's library titles may vary slightly from its upcoming releases but will hover around the $15 mark.

We're reaching a tipping point.  As theatrical revenues decrease (even with rising ticket prices) and DVD sales go down, the studios are hungry for cash.  By making downloads available before DVDs go on sale, Hollywood is saying "screw you" to retailers like Wallmart.  They're throwing retailers under the bus, not caring if they reduce the retailer's take so long as they increase their own.

It's only a matter of time before some studio decides to do the same to the theatres.  We are quickly reaching a point where a studio will make a download available the same day a film opens theatrically.  There may be some pushback.  Perhaps a major retailer like Wallmart will tell Fox that they'll no longer carry their DVDs or a theatre chain will boycott movies from a particular studio.  However, that may simply drive more business directly to the studios.  If you want to see a Fox film and can't find the DVD, why not download it?

Just like record stores have mostly disappeared and physical bookstores are suffering, movie theatres may be next.  While they won't vanish entirely, we could be looking at a drastic reduction in the number of theatres.

The theatres are not blameless in this.  While multiplexes are the standard, their selection of films is limited to mainstream releases.  That has narrowed the audience that goes to the movies.  Theatres have done nothing to police their patrons with regard to talking during films and because audiences have been shrinking, theatres have inflated the cost of tickets and their concessions in order to bolster their own bottom lines.  Combine all that with a soft economy, and audience has many reasons to stay home.

It would be ironic after theatres have invested heavily in digital projection at the request of the studios if the studios walked away from them, but it wouldn't surprise me.  I don't doubt that Hollywood bean counters are staring at the numbers right now, deciding at exactly what point the revenue from downloads will be comparable to the revenue from theatres.  Once they reach that point, it's the end of movie theatres as we know them.

Oswald the Missing Link

The new Walt Disney Treasures DVD release, The Adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, is a revelation on several fronts. While the films might not hit the heights of invention found in the Fleischer or Messmer silents, their overall quality is superior. These films can best be described as breezy. They are well animated for the time, packed with gags, and moving at a fast pace.

I have to admit to never thinking much of Disney's Alice shorts. The animation is stilted, relying heavily on cycles and re-use. The drawings and motion are hardly graceful. By contrast, the Oswald shorts are a major step forward. Dick Huemer said that the New York animators all paid attention to the Oswald shorts, realizing that Disney was doing superior work. With this series, Disney became a major player within the animation world.

As good as the shorts are, they (and the rest of silent animation) were behind what live action comedies were doing at the time. The stories are simple, often based purely on a setting. Oswald is not a particularly well developed character. I think that Messmer's Felix is still superior as a character, though the production values of the Messmer films are not up to the Oswalds.

In many ways, the animation of the late '20's is where live action comedy was at the end of the teens. The major growth in character comedy that took place in the 1920's didn't reach animation until the '30's at Disney and the '40's practically everywhere else. The Oswalds are not competition for the silent Laurel and Hardy shorts and certainly not for the silent features made by Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd.

The DVD set contains 13 Oswalds of the 26 produced. The remaining cartoons are lost, though there are hopes that more will turn up. Print quality is good to excellent, considering that Disney did not preserve these films as he did not own them. There's a fantastic piece of pencil test animation from a currently lost Oswald called Sagebrush Sadie. How often do you get to see 80 year old pencil tests?

Commentaries are by Mark Kausler, Leonard Maltin and Jerry Beck and they identify animation by Hugh Harman, Ub Iwerks, Rollin Hamilton and Friz Freleng. The second disk includes the documentary The Hand Behind the Mouse about Ub Iwerks as well as 3 Alice cartoons and some early Iwerks Mickey and Silly Symphony cartoons.

One thing this set makes clear is that Charles Mintz was a greedy fool. He had a successful series on his hands and instead of giving Disney a modest increase in budget and letting the money continue to roll in, he wanted it all and took the series and the crew away from Disney. The irony is that he did Disney an enormous favour. Yes, Mickey Mouse resulted from losing Oswald, but the bigger lesson was that Disney never again trusted his business partners. He realized that they were all short term thinkers and that they underestimated his talent and ambition.

Had Mintz given Disney what he wanted, Disney would have been tied to Mintz, a producer whose films are relatively obscure. Mintz produced other cartoon series like Krazy Kat and Scrappy, but he was clearly not a creative producer. While Mintz was able to release cartoons through RKO, Universal and Columbia, they were not the studios with the best financial footing in the 1930's and Mintz never really cracked the big time. Who knows if Mintz would have had the foresight to allow Disney to make sound cartoons the way he wanted to? It's unlikely that Mintz would ever have approved the idea of an animated feature.

Oswald is the nexus of Hollywood animation. He is the missing link between Alice and Mickey, showing precisely where Disney animation was just before the sound revolution. He is also the hidden origin of the Schlesinger studio as Hugh Harman, Friz Freleng and Ham Hamilton all worked on Oswald before animating Bosko. Finally, Oswald is one conduit through which N.Y. animators began to flow west, with Walter Lantz and Bill Nolan inheriting Oswald after Disney's crew went elsewhere. There's an awful lot of history wrapped up in these films, so if you are interested in Disney or animation history, this DVD set is essential.