Hercules

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Synopsis

In order to return home to Mount Olympus, Hercules needs to prove he can move from "zero" to true hero with Pegasus, the flying stallion, and Phil -- a feisty personal trainer. Along the way, Hercules must match wits with Grecian beauty Meg and a comical hothead named Hades who, with the help of Pain and Panic, plans to take over the Universe.

Picture 9/10

Disney’s Hercules is presented in the aspect ratio of about 1.78:1 on this dual-layer Blu-ray disc. The transfer is presented in 1080p/24hz.

Disney’s animated features are rarely consistent and seem to be a hit-and-miss affair. For every half decent presentation like The Little Mermaid there’s always a couple more like The Sword in the Stone or Fun and Fancy Free. Thankfully Hercules presents one of the better transfers I’ve seen for an animated title. Colours come off a tad muted and aren’t as bright or bold as I would have expected, but it could be the intended look. Thankfully the artwork is clear and rarely fuzzy, with cleanly rendered lines and some fairly crisp details. There are also noticeable textures in the artwork, which is fairly welcome in comparison to the flattened look a lot of their animated films get on the format, and the animation comes off smooth and clean.

There’s no damage of note, though that’s not too surprising since Disney is usually good at this. But most importantly the final image doesn’t suffer from any grave issues from the digital clean up. The image ultimately doesn’t look like a film and looks closer to a computer image since they have scrubbed grain away, but this hasn’t harmed the overall image at all.

Audio 9/10

The disc includes a fairly active 5.1 surround track presented in DTS-HD MA. The musical numbers in the film are probably some of the most mediocre in Disney’s history (I can’t recall a single one) but sound quality is fantastic and there’s some excellent direction and splits, with nice positioning of the instruments and vocals. Action scenes are fairly immersive, enveloping the viewer, and effects move naturally between the speakers. Bass is good but not overbearing and dynamic range is strong. Excellent surround presentation overall.

Extras 1/10

For a supposed “Special Edition” it’s an incredibly empty one. There’s a useless promotional Making-of that runs about 10-minutes. Though it features interviews and footage of voice recordings it’s a useless bit of fluff. The disc also features Ricky Martin’s No Importa la Distancia music video, which runs about 5-minutes, and then finally a Sing-Along for From Hero to Zero, which is basically just the sequence from the film with the lyrics on screen.

And that’s it. The film didn’t do well and seems to be one that Disney has tried to forget so I can’t say I’m too surprised, but when you release something that says “Special Edition” I would almost suspect something to be special about it.

Closing

The supplements are useless but the presentation looks and sounds exceptional.

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