The animation-on-disc website DVD Toons has been busy lately, with an update of more than six reviews, covering several recent releases and everything from The Man Called Flintstone (“typically fun business, a fitting way to end the original incarnation of The Flintstones, in their cinematic swan song”), last fall’s Kim Possible: The Villain Files (“another unquestionably fun outing for Kim, though for reasons completely unknown, a 1.33:1 image re-composes the aspect ratio, cropping off the sides”) and the recent The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (“quite imaginative, though this show is for kids, and adults will certainly have a different perspective on it”). The site also looks at the truncated American version of Martin Rosen’s 1982 animated feature The Plague Dogs, which recently made its debut on a hard-to-find DVD: “It’s almost worth hunting down just to take in the gist of the film and imagine what could have been, and though this shortened version (which loses around 20 minutes of screentime) doesn’t do itself or the audience any favors, it is to be commended that this important film has made it to DVD at all. Its points are based on the surviving strength of the story, still sufficiently powerful enough to warrant a high score”.

New to DVD Toons is an exhaustive, in-depth look at the new Pocahontas: 10th Anniversary Edition, with lengthy comparisons to the packed deluxe LaserDisc edition, from which this 2-disc DVD set culls much of its material. “Ten years after Disney’s ambitious animated musical first debuted in theaters, this edition is a timely reminder of one of the Studio’s most overlooked and much-maligned features” reads the review, while commenting on the addition of the musical song If I Never Knew You: “Does the new – and originally intended – sequence make the difference? With it Pocahontas works so much better and certainly more coherently as a whole. It simply rounds the film out more, brings a more poignant closure to Pocahontas and Smith’s relationship and lifts the film to a new level. Mature Disney fans can reclaim Pocahontas as their their own, and even for anyone with previous editions, there’s nothing like seeing If I Never Knew You back where it should be. A rare and worthy upgrade for LD collectors, too”. Pocahontas is released next Tuesday, May 3, while all the other discs are in stores now.