Pixelation transition without antialiasing

[ClubM]

Hi everyone,

i'm looking for some advice to help me achieve this pixelation transition used in the 90s super mario bros 3 cartoon intro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJLTLNqPy-M
I would like to remake the effect as close as possible.

The original art underneath the blocky effect probably looks similar to this:
https://i.postimg.cc/bsg31rDY/example2.png (https://postimg.cc/bsg31rDY)

But i wonder how the go from that to this:
https://i.postimg.cc/yksLJcNr/example1.png (https://postimg.cc/yksLJcNr)

It looks like the are zooming, stretching and squashing the footage slightly underneath.
But i can't wrap my head around how the averaged out the image into clean squares that still sorta represent the art.
Without making it look blurry / antialiased.

I was playing around with the Mosaic Blur filter in Davinci Resolve but my attempts don't look quite right.
Appreciate any tips or advice. :thanks:

[poisondeathray]

Animate a downscale (using something other than nearest neighbor) , upscale using nearest neighbor (this preservers the blockiness) . You can animate width and height asymetrically if you wanted to squash or stretch it

[ClubM]

Animate a downscale (using something other than nearest neighbor) , upscale using nearest neighbor (this preservers the blockiness) . You can animate width and height asymetrically if you wanted to squash or stretch it

Thanks for the tip poisondeathray.
This helped tremendously with my restoration. Thank you so much!