When I first began my research into animation history, there were relatively few sources of information available. A scattering of books and a smattering of fanzines served as the font of knowledge for the field. Unless one was willing to call or write individual animators or directors (by standard telephone or snail-mail, for my younger readers), one had to make do with the meager research done by others. This research often turned out to be compilations of who directed what film or short, and perhaps a line or two about the artisans that worked on it. Occasional comments and anecdotes from a few talented individuals provided a dim insight into the making of a film or the inspirations that lay behind it. Frequently, the same quotes seemed to circulate from one book to another like some truncated dissemination of gospel. O, happy the lot of those who take up the charge today; the amount of information available on the topic of animation is staggering, and the sources more plentiful than ever. One of the best sources available, which did not even exist until a scant few years ago, comes to us from an unexpected domain: The world of home entertainment.

This special Toy Story DVD set offers loads of extras. © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

Enter the Disc...
Sometime during 1994, some ten years after the music CD gained widespread acceptance in America, a Hollywood ad hoc committee met to discuss the creation of standards for putting movies into a radically new format. The Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) was about to come into reality; engineers at Phillips, Sony, Toshiba and Matsushita were all making contributions to the finished product. The result was a single-layer disc 4.75 inches in diameter, but oh, what that tiny disc could do! That single DVD could hold the equivalent information stored on 3,400 floppy discs (or 5,300,000 pages of text). One hundred and thirty-five minutes of video plus nine hours of music could be embedded in its micropits, all waiting to be released by the scan of an infa-red laser. The thin, digital donut became available in Japan in 1996, and was introduced in seven U.S. cities the following year. By 1997, DVDs were available across the country. The first film transferred to DVD was not an animated feature (it was, in fact, A Hard Day's Night), but it was not long before toons were dancing in the laser beams as well.

DVDs are, of course, popular for their amazingly sharp pictures, flexible formats (such as letterbox or widescreen), and theater-quality sound, courtesy of 5.1 channel Dolby Digital. Older animated features transferred to DVD can be startling in their appearance, as if the film stock had been dipped in some digital Fountain of Youth that restored its lustrous colors and crisp details to breathless perfection. The enhanced soundtracks and vibrant appearance of animated features, new or old, are a great gift to animation fans, but in some cases the extra features come close to eclipsing them; this is where the old order changeth and a new way of reporting, recording and collecting animation history begins. An increasing number of DVDs now tell the entire history of a film from inception to release; many DVDs embellish this history, for example, with soundtracks that include running commentary by the creators, writers and directors, if that is what the listener chooses to hear. If one would rather enjoy the film (in up to 32 languages) without extraneous comments, there are typically interviews included on the menu anyway.