More on Porco Rosso

By Shamus Posted Monday Mar 20, 2006

Filed under: Anime 4 comments

I just re-read my post on Porco Rosso from a few days ago and realized that I made the movie sound like a serious drama with no action whatsoever. This is not the case. My point was that there isn’t more action than there needs to be, and that the movie isn’t afraid of taking its time when it needs to. Indeed, there are some fun and exciting moments in it:


A low-altitude aerial dogfight.


Porco flies the red plane. (Porco Rosso means “crimson pig”)


There is even a car chase (truck chase, really) through the streets of Italy.

In the original post I mentioned that I didn’t think my kids would like it. I stand corrected. They love it. I’m sure their favorite moments (the comedy and airfights) are different from mine (Porco’s quiet moments of reflection on his past) but there is plenty in there for all of us to like.

A side note about this goofy PowerDVD software I’m using: It’s odd. It has a million obscure options for fiddling with the color and aspect ratio, adjusting the de-interlacing (whatever) and altering the behvior of any number of inscrutable acronyms, but the obvious stuff doesn’t seem to work right. To wit:

  • The “capture” button doesn’t always work. It seems I have to re-select “capture to clipboard” each time, even though it’s already checked.
  • I have “keep original video size” checked under screen capture, and I can see it is clearly reducing the images and re-sizing them.
  • The black border on the images above? The first time I played the movie they weren’t there. Now they are, and I can’t find an option to make them go away.
  • Every time I take a screen capture it advances a couple of frames. Annoying.

It’s not like this is new technology. I’m using version 5 of PowerDVD. You’d think interface annoyances and bugs like these would have been fixed by now.

Annoying.

 


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4 thoughts on “More on Porco Rosso

  1. Do you have the “maintain aspect ratio” box checked? That should not be.

  2. eekee says:

    PowerDVD 4 Had an… interesting… bug with capture too. You could capture to clipboard, paste it into Paint, hit play & watch the movie play in Paint.

    If you saved it you’d get a black image. There was a way to save it that worked, but I forget what it was now.

  3. Andre says:

    A little late, but I thought I’d let you know, for what it’s worth, that a DVD’s “original video size” might not necessarily be related to your resolution. In fact, I believe a DVD’s actual resolution is somewhere closer to standard definition (640×480, obviously tweaked for whatever aspect ratio) than it is to high definition (16billion x 12gajillion, or whatever ungodly resolution your new computer is capable of. ;)), so “keep original video size” might be the setting that’s thwarting your plans to capture a high resolution image. Then again, I’m not DVD expert. Some of my numbers may be off, but you get the idea.

    Again, I realize it’s nearly a year later, but take that for what it’s worth.

  4. SongCoyote says:

    Heyo!

    As a long-time fan of Hayao Miyazaki in general and Porco Rosso in particular I have to thank you for reminding me of it. It’s been a while since I had time to sit down and watch many movies, so I’ve not indulged my jones for Studio Ghibli lately.

    I completely agree with your (other post’s) statements about the difference between American and Japanese cinema, and especially animation. It’s one of the reasons I love anime :)

    Thanks for the thoughts, and have a good one!

    Light and laughter,
    SongCoyote

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