Hey Eve, It’s Time to Shine! Life-Size Finally Streams in HD on Disney+
Disney+ wasn’t initially prepared for the Lohanisance, but they’ve righted that wrong this week with the long-delayed streaming debut of Life-Size. When the streaming service launched in 2019, Freeform’s 2018 sequel Life-Size 2 was a launch-day title, but the 2000 original film was curiously missing. It’s taken six years to get this Y2K classic on the platform, but it turns out it was worth the wait. Disney didn’t just slap the DVD version of Life-Size on the service; they remastered it in HD widescreen!
Derivative of films like Mannequin (20th Century Studios) and I Want a Mom for Christmas (Disney), Life-Size follows Casey (Lindsay Lohan), a football-obsessed girl who recently lost her mom. When a doll accidentally gets in the conjuring circle intended to bring her mother back to life, Casey finds herself looking after Eve (Tyra Banks), once the most popular doll in the world, now struggling to reconnect with kids. Eve helps Casey reconnect with the world she shut out in the wake of her mother’s death, and Casey allows Eve to understand how to stay relevant at the dawn of a new millennium.
Life-Size was Lindsay Lohan’s second film, following her breakout role in The Parent Trap in 1998. Filmed in 1999 in Vancouver, supermodel Tyra Banks wasn’t exactly new to acting, having had guest appearances on multiple TV shows (including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), but Life-Size was her first starring role ahead of her big screen debut in Coyote Ugly.
Life-Size premiered on Sunday, March 5th, 2000, on ABC, part of The Wonderful World of Disney. Following its initial broadcast, the film enjoyed continuous rebroadcasts on Disney Channel, so much so that a lot of fans thought it was a Disney Channel Original Movie. Ahead of the launch of Disney+, the company promised that every DCOM would be on the service, leading to confusion when Life-Size wasn’t there. Sadly, most of The Wonderful World of Disney original films from this era are still unavailable to stream.
Director and co-writer Mark Rosman is something of a legend to Disney fans of this era. In addition to Life-Size, he helmed Disney’s Model Behavior, best remembered as former Mousketeer Justin Timberlake’s return to acting after the success of N*SYNC. His TV directing credits include episodes of Even Stevens and Lizzie McGuire, and his working relationship with Hilary Duff extended to her big screen roles in A Cinderella Story (2004) and The Perfect Man (2005).
One of the core elements of Life-Size is the fact that the Eve doll brand is struggling to connect with Y2K kids. Through knowing Casey, Eve returns to her doll world with more modern ideas of what girls are into. When The Barbie Movie ignited the summer of 2023, many fans were quick to point out similarities, which were expanded in that film. But there’s also a symbiotic relationship, with Life-Size drawing inspiration from Barbie’s commercials and aesthetic. Without Barbie, we wouldn’t have Life-Size. However, without Life-Size, The Barbie Movie might not have been what it is today.
Now streaming on Disney+, Life-Size looks better than it ever has before. There’s no evidence of artificial upscaling, with the film retaining its softer TV palette and a light layer of grain, indicative of this era. To Disney’s credit, the HD version doesn’t show any signs of AI tampering. This was clearly a labor of love.
I had heard that many of Disney’s TV movies from this era were filmed in widescreen, but that all visual effects were done in fullscreen and standard definition. Many of the early Y2K DCOMs on Disney+ have been cropped into widescreen, missing picture at the top and bottom of the screen. In the case of Life-Size, fans are given more image on the sides of the screen than ever before, without losing any of the top and bottom of the frame. It appears that the visual effects had to be redone, although there are not many of them. For example, in the opening Eve commercial, sliding frames have a yellow border, which was done in 4:3 ratio in the original version. They look the same in widescreen, but fill the 16:9 screen now.
From sparkles on Casey’s spell book to the Eve doll glowing, the redone visual effects for the widescreen version of Life-Size faithfully adhere to the original production design. Unless you did a side-by-side comparison (which I did), differences are nearly undetectable. They could’ve gone full George Lucas on this classic, but thankfully, they remained faithful to the TV budget limitations of the time.
Slightly more noticeable is Eve’s return to doll form. In the original version, Tyra Banks was quite drowned out by the chunky magic dust. In the HD widescreen version, you get to see her more clearly, with more refined sparkles, but the colors remain true to what they were, with hues of yellow, pink, and green.
The runtime on Disney+ is 12 seconds shorter than on DVD. Commercial break pauses have been tightened up, which accounts for most of the difference. At the end of the credits, the streaming version also loses the original Walt Disney Television logo, but Disney+ tries to sell you on watching another Lindsay Lohan classic before the credits finish, so I doubt many fans will notice. Speaking of which, when Freakier Friday starts streaming on November 12th, Disney+ will have all of Lohan’s Disney work available to stream.