Rating summary
| Movie |  | 4.0 |
| Video |  | 4.5 |
| Audio | | 4.0 |
| Extras |  | 3.0 |
| Overall | | 4.0 |
Porco Rosso Blu-ray Movie Review
Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson December 7, 2017
Shout! Factory has reissued Porco Rosso, one of Hayao Miyazaki's least known works, with identical special features save for a textless opening and ending credits sequence. The image transfer and audio presentation appear to be very similar if not the same as the previous Blu-ray released over two years ago.
This Blu-ray & DVD Combo Pack comes with a slipcover, an Elite case for the discs, and a slim leaflet (see Screenshot #3). Cover art on the slip and keep case covers is the same (see #s 1 and 10). For thoughts on this 1992 film, please see my colleague Kenneth Brown's review of Disney's 2015 BD/DVD twin pack here.
Front of slip cover and back of BD case.
Porco Rosso Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality
Porco Rosso appears in its native ratio of 1.85:1 on a BD-50. The MPEG-4 AVC-encoded transfer sports an average bitrate of 35000 kbps and a standard bitrate of 41.73 Mbps for the full disc. I don't have any finite data about the prior US BD but I would expect Shout!'s encoding to match or be at least a little higher. Capture #s 5-9 are taken from the new disc.
Shout! has supplied eighteen scene selections.
Porco Rosso Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality
The three audio codecs on the Blu-ray consist of an English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo remix (2056 kbps, 24-bit), the original Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo (2069 kbps, 24-bit), and a Dolby Digital 2.0 track (192 kbps) dubbed in French.
Shout! gives viewers the choice of three subtitling options: English SDH for the hard-of-hearing, English subtitles for the original language version, and French subtitles.
Porco Rosso Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras
The extras come with English subs where needed.
- Feature-Length Storyboards (1:33:24, 1080p)
- Interview with Producer Toshio Suzuki (3:23, upscaled to 1080)
- "Behind the Microphone" featurette (7:05, upscaled to 1080)
- NEW Textless Opening and Closing Credits
- Original Japanese Theatrical Trailers (7:57, 1080p)
- NEW 8-page Booklet with Producer's and Director's Statements
Porco Rosso Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation
Porco Rosso is one of the more obscure titles in Miyazaki's oeuvre but it deserves a place in every anime fan's collection. Brand-new copies of the discontinued Disney disc are going for $30 so you'll save over $10 by purchasing this re-release. A SOLID RECOMMENDATION for a title that I'm glad is available again on high-def.
