My soul-sucking experience restoring an old Brazilian cartoon
Brazil has no real animation or filmmaking industry, everyone is doing what they can, but there was a small attempt in the 80s when Mauricio de Souza seeked to put his comic book characters in animation - it started in the mid 70s with little shorts and commercials that the big TV stations refused to air, seeking to kill the idea in its birth bed, as is with most things in Brazil - so they seeked help from the Military Dictatorship (1964 - 1985) which funded their first Feature film, released in 1982, their second in 1983, and so on up until the early 90s when the State company that oversaw government-funded features (EMBRAFILME) was closed by the then “Liberal” Government of President Collor.
The interesting part about this, it’s as if the guy that made the Peanuts had no one to turn to if he wanted to make cartoons out of his creation, and had to import animators from Uruguay and Argentina, as well as get the army to help with resources because you don’t even have enough CELS to shoot the film with. That’s how bad it was when making these early cartoons.
I myself, grew up with these movies. My parents owned the VHS releases from the 80s, of which I still own, so there was some sentimental value to them. However, due to them being the only well-known releases of these films, a better quality version is all but unheard of. I’d restore both but it was ideal to just focus on one at a time.
I picked the second feature, released in 1983, called “The Princess and the Robot”, of which the only way to watch it at the time was on Youtube through a terrible VHS rip of a terrible VHS copy with terrible compression, which looked like this:
Mauricio de Souza judged these films as too old and rough for DVD re-releases, the choppy animation and awkward pacing/voice acting certainly being noticeable, though the truth lies more in how the bar for what's considered a "kids movie" has been set so low as to lobotomize any real creative effort or storytelling tension, which to this film's disavantage, was still made back when there even was such ambitions, and parents groups wouldn't activate the state to take down and censor anything that might scare/influence their child.
I figured I’d bite the bullet and order a bunch of VHS tapes and pay for the transfer, I knew there was one place that would do it in a mall close by. The first tape I was going to order was going to be one of the First release in the 80s. Well, WAS, at least until the seller begged me to not buy the tape and just buy a DVD of the tape he had, of which I caved in and accepted. Weeks and weeks go by and the dvd finally arrived, which looked like this:
It didn’t take too long for me to realize I’ve been scammed by some oblivious idiot that thought his shitty DVD recorder + VCR was the best way to capture VHS footage, not to mention this transfer looked absolutely atrocious in motion, with horrible interlacing, compression artifacts, and extremely noisy. There was no choice but to scrap it and go back to square 1.
I decided, this time, to look for the 1999 re-release, which I had only recently known about - figuring that since this was a newer release, and that it says it was digitally remastered in the cover - I picked one of these up and went full-in with a transfer.
To be absolutely sure the transfer would go well (I’ve had bad experiences in the past), I personally asked the old man doing it if I could see his equipment and judge the quality of the transfer, he’d guarantee me it would be “the best you could get out of VHS”, however looking at the equipment (a DVD recorder wired to a CRT) I had to stomach another scam, nevermind the fact that my family and everyone I knew was making fun of me for blowing money to restore old cartoons for babies.
It could’ve been worse. The transfer came out looking like that, which was fine by me. There are still problems like the interlacing, a misaligned red channel, bizarre digital color-correction and remastering decisions (I picked this exact scene as an example, these aren’t supposed to be the original colors), as well as a couple VHS glitches (I even ordered another copy to circumvent around that)
At the same time I was restoring the film, I would make these couple music videos as previews, both to make people curious, as well as to show whoever was interested how much better my version was going to look while using one of the songs from the film, a power ballad which kinda illustrates the ambition they used to have back in the day when they made these films. The music certainly outlived these films.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NznWtFHExOc
The music video did seem to spark interest in a couple people, seeing as I was going to release this alongside English subtitles to try and grab the rare-animation folk, who would “surely” appreciate my restoration efforts better than any Brazilian.
Months later and many VirtualDub passes, color correction on Sony Vegas and painting mistakes out in CSP, I finally finished my first version of the Restoration.
Still planning on making subtitles and getting that second tape transferred, I put release off until I could edit and fix the VHS glitches, but I had to find another place to transfer the tapes, or hell, maybe even buy my own equipment, until of course, this happened:
Why would they copyright claim these gay little montages promoting a shitty fan-made restoration, you know? Not to mention when they had so little views while the official channel racks up millions of views for their actual newer shorts. Though at the time, I was relieved in this enormous weight was off my shoulders since I figured I was too busy and poor to keep working on this. If only it actually had ended there.
A couple months later and the official Monica’s Gang channel would release this:
A 10 million subscriber, Special Comemorative Edition of the 35th Anniversary of the Princess and the Robot, completely skipping the first 1982 film (Which still awaits a similar treatment), as well as completely sidestepping me by virtue of being an HD transfer from an old 35mm master, instead of the old shitty VHS tapes I was using.
Absolutely no work was put on to this besides an HD transfer. They scanned the negative as it was, full of dirt and splices, pink, faded, with worse degraded audio than the VHS I used, uncropped with tons of garbage area, compressed it down to 600MB so it wouldn’t take a long time to upload it to Youtube, and called it a day.
Without a reason for my restoration (besides filling back in some of the bizarre new cuts in the film’s editing, which deleted entire scenes out), I kinda died that day. It’s not until now when I’m reminiscing this stuff that I figured THIS event was key in me pushing my restoration projects on the side, right when I had some projects I wanted to work on, like a new version of my Rock & Rule restoration or new videos about The Black Cauldron’s deleted scenes.
It would’ve been a thankless experience, nonetheless. Like the people that repost my Rock & Rule restoration or take notes from my Black Cauldron research, or sidestep me with their Dark Crystal fan-edits and videos where you paid 8 thousand dollars for The Black Cauldron storyboards just so you can make a video about the deleted scenes quoting verbatim throughout your video without crediting me.
I didn’t give up, though. I had a plan of carrying on the restoration of this movie myself as a final fuck you to Mauricio de Souza, but I just don’t have time for that stuff anymore. My music videos are still on Youtube, but I can’t rip them from there, I lost the original files and I think I’m gonna have to record this with OBS, which I might just do, along with a new version of the music video too, because fuck it.
Everytime I deal with brazilian stuff I just get faced and barraged with an unreasonable, vicious ammount of resistance. I’m tired of soul sucking experiences. Honestly I should just upgrade to getting my dick sucked.
