Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind Blu-ray Release

Hope a US release gets announced soon, as I'd rather not spend $80 per film. Porco Rosso and Princess Mononoke are really the only two I'd be prepared to spend that kind of money on.

Count me in. I'm not sure I'll need the U.S. release -- the english dub was a nice job, but I can't imagine I'd ever listen to it anyway. This Japanese version seems like it has everything I want.

Will the U.S. Disney versions only contain the English dubs in DD lossy, however?

No, it'll probably be just like the Japanese version. Lossless japanese track on the Japanese release + lossy eng dub but the reverse for the NA version.

*Does the Happy Dance!*

YAY! I've been waiting for these movies to start hitting blu-ray ever since I bought my first blu disc. If the US release isn't announced soon, I might just import it.


Lets hope these aren't just an upscale of the DVD like that one release of Spirited Away....

Like that what one release of Spirited away?

http://www.ghibliworld.com/news.html

Alright, so this was released, and the image for the most part is breath taking. It looks really good, especially when you consider it's 26 years old.

You can see screenshots at these links. I'm not going to repost them because I didn't take them.

http://blog.affenheimtheater.de/en/2...y-of-the-wind/
http://forums.highdefdigest.com/blu-...-7-14-a-2.html
http://www.mania.com/aodvb/showthread.php?p=1804049


Positives: No processing at first glance. Healthy grain and no edge enhancement. No windowboxing and 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Original mono track presented in LPCM 2.0 @ 48KHz/24-bit. Very natural and rich in texture. Very high bitrate on the video; constantly at around 40Mbps. Sharp natural image. Disc seems to be region free.

Minuses: Didn't attempt to give us as much picture data as possible. You'll notice the BD overall has more of the image, but it also removes some of it that DVD had. Didn't use the original title card from the negative. Maybe it wasn't as good? Notice it has the certification on it. Once again it's been color corrected for Japanese TVs at 9000k. Colors are dull and whites are once again pink. There's no pop or saturation, and they look off. Audio wasn't losslessly compressed in DTS-HD MA 2.0 @ 192Khz/24-bit.

___Japanese BD______Japanese DVD___Some old chinese bootleg I dug up
















windowboxing removed from the DVDs and image centered for better comparing

Oh my goodness, it looks amazing!

This looks like reference stuff. I must get it.

That's simply gorgeous.

Amazon Japan, CD Japan and YesAsia all have order links for this at the moment. (Amazon Japan is cheaper than the others right now, but shipping apparently balances that out.)

Frankly I wish Disney would allow their classics to look like this instead of scrubbing out every trace of grain.

Agreed.

I'd love to buy this, but by Crom it is expensive.

I preordered this but cheaped out on shipping so it hasn't arrived yet but it ought to be here soon. Looking forward to it, especially after seeing those caps.

I hope Princess Mononoke gets announced relatively soon. I wouldn't bat an eye at plunking down full price for the Japanese BD release of that. It's one of my favorite films of all time and I very rarely watch anime (though that is starting to change).

My disc just came in today. After spot-checking it, I am very impressed. A few shots are out of focus here and there (obviously not an encoding flaw) but overall it is very crisp with a well-represented veil of light grain. The English subtitle track seems to be slightly different from the one on the US DVD if my memory serves me ("Ohmu" is now "Ohm," for example) but it doesn't seem to be anything to be concerned about. Extras are in HD but in Japanese only, with the standout being the storyboard stills of the entire film put together with the audio from the movie to form a sort of animatic. It's pretty neat.

The packaging is very classy in a heavy book-like case and comes with a small "guide book."

I might not read or speak Japanese but even I can tell that this is an absolutely beautiful release and I would love to see more like it. I would gladly pay full Japanese list price for more Ghibli titles presented like this. They do their anime Criterion-style.

Considering how much anime costs to buy on shiny round discs in Japan, they had better be issuing Criterion-quality releases.

I watched this too.


The source elements must have been in very good condition, or the restoration work was incredibly meticulous. Considering it's age, it looks absolutely fantastic. Imagine the treatment Blade Runner received applied to an old anime film, and this is what it would look like. I hope as old anime films get remastered and released, they will look as good as Nausicaa does. Ghost in the Shell (original, not 2.0!) didn't look all that great and it's a much newer film than Nausicca. There is a steady stream of old Gundam series and movies being released on Blu-ray, I wonder how those look.


The movie was slightly cropped to fit in the 16:9 Blu-ray frame. This is commonly done to 1.85:1 native aspect films because the image loss is minimal and quite frankly many TVs crop that much anyways because of overscan. The colors looked fine to me on my calibrated TV, though I no longer have any DVD release of the film to compare with. NTSC D65 is a universal video and photo color temperature, NTSC-J follows the same color temperature standard as NTSC-U. Unless Japan is weird and their color temperature standard is different, which it shouldn't be. There is no mathematical difference between LPCM and DTS-HDMA, and the original quality of this film's audio elements are not all that good (give it a break, it's 26 years old!!) so 192khz would be stupid and a waste, like the Akira Japanese Blu-ray release.

Loved this film. Always have and would like it on BD, but at a reasonable price.

You ain't kiddin'. Thankfully, they delivered just that.

Knowing my luck it will be years before they do Princess Mononoke (my favorite). And I must say, PHL does excellent work.

@Faceless Rebel There was no restoration. They simply scanned the best elements they had at 6k. They did a very careful job when doing this. Apparently the reason the new title card has certification on it is because they don't have the original negative of it anymore. There are also a few scenes that are soft and out of focus.

I, too, wish every film got this kind of treatment. It all depends on the existing elements, time, money, and the company doing it. A lot of anime is from existing masters, old transfers, or worse, upscaled from SD.

I can't remember them off the top of my head, but there are a few JPN BDs out there that look on par with this release.

I'm going to have to disagree with you on it being a waste of space for the audio. It's mono mirrored on 2.0. But it's LPCM 24-bit/48KHz, which means it's taking up more space then it needs to since it's not losslessly compressed. I think they could have gone 24-bit/192KHz in DTS-MA and it would have come out only slightly larger than the space it's taking up currently. But since Buena Vista Japan is handling this aka Disney, they were probably cheap bastards and decided not to pay the fees.

Japan has a standard of 9300K. All you have to do is take a look at the WWF logo at the beginning of the film to see they didn't correct the chroma only, they simply tinted the whole damn picture. Spirited Away and Ponyo are also like this.

http://pocketnews.cocolog-nifty.com/...post-15f8.html

The film was draw and filmed at 1.85:1. All of their films are. There is no need to crop. It's minor, and it's not a huge issue, but they could have been more careful to present more of the image. You can clearly see inconsistencies between the BD and DVD. For the most part the BD has more information, but you can see parts were there is less.

I'd disagree that Akira was a waste at full audio detail.

I WANT THIS BLU-RAY.

I hope that all the Ghibli releases get this kind of treatment, because this is simply outstanding compared to the DVD.

My guess is they will be. Disney has the license for the Ghibli films -- and in my opinion Disney has been second-to-none in BD quality.

So I wasn't surprised that the NAUSICAA disc looked good... I was surprised at how good they got it to look. It's just amazing. I've already watched it twice!

I expect all the Ghibli films to look at least this good, especially anything directed by Miyazaki.

Impatiently waiting for the next one...

Man, I really want this disc, but it's so ridiculously expensive to import this one from Japan. I don't mind paying a bit extra for an exceptional disc, but 70 euro for a single movie is just too much. Looks like I'll just have to bide my time and wait for a good deal on this one.

I can't wait for the US release, it is a day one buy for me. I also can't wait to see this in HD, but there is no way I am dropping that much for an import movie (I'll pay that price to import a game, but not a movie) so I found a 720p rip to hold me over for the US blu-ray release. (looks pretty darn good, way better than my DVD, but it was re-cropped to save some file size)

Considering I already own the Nausicaa disney DVD I didn't feel too bad about doing this, but I wish that they would release the US version asap so I can give them the money that they deserve for this release.

Well, except for their treatment of original language tracks on foreign titles.

Hopefully they will do Nausicaa right, but let's assume that they pull a Ponyo/Hero with a lossless dub and only a lossy original language track. The Ghibli films might be worth $80 to me, but why should Disney treating the original language as a second class citizen result in them getting three times as much of my money?

I'll do it once (did so for Ponyo) if it does just that little bit to get the message to them we'll pay for the releases that do it right. After that, it just seems like playing in to an extortion of many American Ghibli fans.

If it were not Disney distributing the title in Japan, the cost would still be high, but I would have no issues giving a different distributor my money.

In all honesty, Disney is not doing this on purpose to extort money from people like us who want the original audio track in lossless. The number of people who import ANY titles, much less $80 ones from Japan, is so minuscule that it would not show up in any reasonably-scaled look at sales, nor would anyone bat an eye even if it were brought directly to their attention. And the same goes for "sending a message" by showing you want the lossless Japanese track so bad you'll import - again, no way such a small phenomenon is even on their radar.

The US release of Ponyo is like it is due to either standard practice templates (as postulated by Jeff of the Digital Bits), or ignorance / negligence of those involved with the project. And any corrections to this issue will be either by feedback from the community (Jeff has contacted those he knows within Disney Home Video, and I'm sure others have written in to whatever capacity they are capable of), or some internal change where those working on new Ghibli titles realize the error of Ponyo and fix it for future releases. This hemming and hawing about what message your sale sends is really pointless, as there is no message. Make purchase decisions for internal reasons, not external.

Some comparisons of the Japanese Blu-ray vs UK Blu-ray.

Apparently someone at Optimum thought it would be a good idea to smoothen the film, sigh.......

There's still some grain, and it looks far from terrible - but they just shouldn't have messed with it.
Although, I do find the grain on the Japanese release to look strangely consistent and somewhat digital.

Hope you don't mind me using your previous screenshots eric.exe .

Japanese left - UK right

Not all exact frames.









23 more screenshots HERE

Yuck... I'm not usually one to comment on screenshot comparisons but the Japanese blu-ray looks a lot better than the UK release. I guess I'll just keep waiting until a US release comes out and hope its doesn't get botched like the UK release.

To be fair, I suspect if the Japanese release didn't exist we'd be hailing the UK version as masterful. It's certainly not bad-looking in any way and a hell of a lot more faithful to the original film element than any of the Disney Diamond Edition releases that always get rave reviews. The Japanese release is a lot more faithful, though, no mistake, and I hope the eventual US release ends up looking like it rather than the UK version.