Keep your ads for your themepark to yourselves, Walt Disney Corporation! (101 Dalmatians (DVD))

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	101 Dalmatians (DVD)
Date:	14/05/09 (9 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fun film that the kids will enjoy

Disadvantages: DVD incorporates unwanted advert for Disneyland

It's a bit of a shock to see cartoon characters that move, in comparison with today's Pixar / computer generated efforts, so very very little and I was frankly, surprised by the relatively low quality of the animation when we got this for recently (on a 'buy 2 Disney DVDs for £15' deal that intermittently runs at Tesco....not the cheapest you can find it for admittedly, but the sprog was poorly that weekend and needed immediate cheering up). Yes, it is in terms of animation quality not that great - rather a throwback as it's quite similar in style to those Hanna-Barbera cartoons (Top Cat, Wally Gator, Yogi Bear, etc. etc.) that used to show on British TV in the 1970s.

It's grown on me since then however - the wintry backgrounds, shown when the dogs are escaping through snow-covered countryside are really well done, and more importantly, after a couple of viewings, the sprog now loves it! So it clearly does the job it's intended for. The songs may grate a bit to adult ears - Roger, the human lead comes across as kind of a reject whose antisocial behaviour at times renders him in sore need of a good slap across the face but I suppose this is done for comic effect and the kids seem to enjoy it. Unfortunately, with the notable exception of Ms De Ville, every one the female characters - dogs, humans, animals and everyone is uniformly simpering and / or useless (many of them spend a lot of time asking the male characters to explain things to them, and tell them what they should do) but hey, this is Disney so what else can we expect. (If I seem a little bitter, please bear in mind that this film currently plays in a continuous loop at our house throughout the waking hours of our sprog, and I have now seen it so often as to be possibly getting into a thoroughly embittered state where I may reading far too much into it).

I do have one very strong objection to this DVD however, which has greatly reduced the rating I would otherwise have given it (which, on the strength of the film itself would've been 3-4 stars). Part of the problem is that it supposedly incorporates a feature called 'fast play' which should in theory enable the viewer to skip past the loads of trailers at the start. I have been unable - and I've tried and tried - to get this feature to work. I therefore have to sit throug many, many adverts for straight-to-DVD Disney productions - and others - before the film starts. It doesn't seem possible to fast forward or skip forward through these trailers to get them over and done with; I can certainly fast forward or skip forward through one at a time, but there about a half a dozen of them, and if I try to fast forward through, this is particularly time consuming as my DVD player apparently has to 'reload' to some extent at the end of each segment, so there is time when I have to wait through a period of seeing nothing but a black-screen between each one.

I can accept that this may be a problem with my DVD player, which admittedly isn't the most recent model off the block. The most egregious feature on this DVD however is the outright advertising of one of Disney's theme parks that is also incorporated at the end of the trailers. It's a TV ad for Disneyland! I can't believe it! I don't much care for being advertised at in the first place, and despite having reared a completely square-eyed, TV-adicted sprog, I don't let the child watch commercial children's channels - because I object strongly to the scourge of kid-oriented advertising. Therefore I consider this advertising to have been very sneakily done; a TV ad for Disneyland has infliltrated our household - in the manner of Greeks hiding in the Trojan Horse - with the trailers on this DVD, and as I intend to be visiting Disney's themepark 'attraction' only when hell freezes over I wish to coneal its existence from the sprog for as long as humanly possible. I haven't seen any ads like this on any of the many other Disney / Pixar DVDs we have at home, and I think it's worrying that apparently they've cottoned on to using this platform for advertising now.

Summary: The film's a treat for kids, if you can skip past all the trailers and....that advert