Sometimes it seems as though streaming has caused more problems than it ever solved. That includes how some shows and movies look much worse than they originally did. But in at least one case, that’s not the fault of the format. In fact, when it comes to certain animated movies from Disney’s Renaissance Era, it’s not even clear that what you see on Disney+ is an inferior edition. But whether you like the version you saw as a kid more or not, the reason the digital copy looks different is simple: it was never put on film.
The newsletter Animation Obsessives explained why some Disney movies really do look different on Disney+. The company hired Pixar in the ’80s (long before the Mouse House purchased the studio). Disney wanted help using digital tools to help with hand-drawn animated movies. As with any change from animated images to an actual moving film, transferring digital files to a physical reel required tweaking colors and saturation.
This CAPS process meant painted shots were turned into composites on computers. Filmmakers then had to put the movie on 35 mm film. There’s technically no reason to do that final step for streaming. It’s a digital format. The CAPS version is made to be streamed, even if no one knew that when they made it. It’s why Disney+ movies on streaming don’t look like the theatrical releases, which were preserved on some early Blu-ray discs. When you watch films like Mulan, Hercules, and The hunchback of Notre Dame on Disney+, you are watching the CAPS version which didn’t require any of the work needed for the actual film seen in actual theaters.
Some of these differences between the origingal Disney movies and the streaming versions are clearly worse. Some are up to the eye of the beholder. And some of the CAPS images are actually much more dynamic. But how you feel isn’t what’s interesting about this insightful piece. It shows sometimes the “correct” version of a piece of art doesn’t exist. This isn’t someone altering an aspect ratio and ruining a visual joke. This is someone showing us a version of a movie that has always existed in this exact format. We just didn’t have a way to see it that way before.