On the Blu-ray, Gankutsuou gets a 1.78:1 widescreen 1080p transfer. I asked All the Anime, and they confirmed that they have used the Japanese Blu-ray masters for their release. You might recall this Fandom Post forum post which offered some screen comparisons between the DVD and the Japanese Blu-ray which raised a few issues and eyebrows. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting of course, and luckily I have the Geneon discs at hand to compare. First the Blu-ray. It’s not bad at all at first acquaintance. The character outlines are certainly sharp and look high definition, but the real positive here is the 24fps progressive playback. The animation is smooth, flicker free and other than a hint of moiré on fine detail in a couple of scenes and the inevitable banding, the transfer looks flawless. Most apparent is that the end credit sequence is unmarred by compression artefacts.
Then I put the DVD in. Sure enough, the interlaced, 30fps transfer isn’t ideal, offering a slight sense of flicker to the image, pans and scrolls are a little jerky, the end credit sequence pretty much makes the DVD player surrender and cry, and this comes from a period when anime distributors didn’t offer progressive encodes on NTSC discs. But once you get past that, it becomes clear that the Blu-ray authors went overboard with the filtering. Certainly character outlines aren’t as sharp on the DVD as they are on the Blu-ray, but there is so much more texture detail on costume art, on hair, on background architecture that the DVD actually looks sharper overall. On top of that, there’s a degree of grain structure on the DVD that isn’t visible on the Blu-ray, and given that this is a digital animation, and any grain would be the creator’s intent, the loss of it on the Blu-ray has to be an error. But worst of all is just how vivid and striking the colours are on DVD, where you would expect the Blu-ray to excel. I do think that they have gone too far with the filtering and post-processing on the Blu-ray, and I can’t help but feel disappointed.