As I mentioned yesterday, since today is Halloween and all, our movie de jour was The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3D...Now I'm not going to bother talking about the movie itself, since it's been out since 1993 and I've seen it about half a billion times (plus I own it on DVD)... although never on the big screen until today... but the whole 3D thing was somewhat interesting...
It's the new "Disney Digital 3D"... and lordy, lordy, lordy is it good!
Gone are the craptastic paper red and blue glasses... these ones are proper plastic glasses with lenses almost like sunglasses... actually according to the poster we were supposed to get a pair that actually looked like a pair of sunglasses... but alas, when the nice lady at the ticket office gave us our glasses they were less than fetching bright green ones. Possibly left over from some random Shrek thing now that I think about it... or else from Monster House in 3D.
As a general rule, 3D doesn't agree with me for some reason, the couple of times we've seen stuff in 3D I walk out of the cinema with a splitting headache. Now whether that's because one of my eyes is less in focus than the other and so my eyes and my brain have to compensate for the increased information that 3D give, I don't know... I just know that I end up with a headache. And if I have to wear the 3D glasses instead of my regular glasses, then it's twice as bad. Fortunately for this kind of 3D I could wear the (less than) stylish green glasses over the top of my regular ones (although I'm sure I looked a little odd). And while I did end up with a tiny bit of a headache it wasn't as bad as previous occasions... and I went into the cinema with a slight headache anyway...
Like I was saying, the red and blue lenses are gone, so I'm actually not sure how the hell this version of 3D works... I'm thinking it might be something to do with polarisation in the lenses (turns out I was right), since rather than the film being coloured red and blue (or red and green or whatever) it's actually just "blurry" without the glasses... and the amount of blur corresponds with how far either "behind" or "in front" of the screen the image is supposed to be.
They had obviously gotten some of the Nightmare props out of storage (or alternatively just recreated them digitally), because there's a brief little intro that tells you that it's time to put your glasses on, and I have to say, I was REALLY, REALLY, REALLY impressed with the quality of the 3D... it seriously looked like there was a pumpkin hanging just above the seat in front of me...
And the whole "Walt Disney Digital" logo sequence... even that was amazing...
Then there was the trailer for Meet the Robinsons... which looks like it's being made specifically for 3D (possibly like Monster House... one "normal" and one 3D version)... but that looked pretty amazing too... and very, very 3D...
Pixar had also come to the party and "recreated" Knick Knack for the 3D system... which is cute as all hell at the best of times, but actually worked really well in 3D.
And then there was Nightmare...
I know it wasn't originally shot for 3D, and they'd obviously done the whole thing somehow digitally (although how they were able to manage it remains a complete and total mystery to me... which means I might have to go looking for a website somewhere that explains it all)... but that did mean that rather than the 3D in the intro piece where the pumpkin ends up hanging in front of your face, all the 3D in Nightmare was "inside" the screen (well, with a couple of exceptions), if that makes sense...
Having said that, it was all very much 3D... possibly a little too subtly in some cases (since it's a movie that was made with real 3D objects rather than animated, so the characters and props already have weight and mass)... and because the 3D had had to be added after the fact, there were a few "goofs" with the "planes"... characters being a little too far forward, or interacting with objects that seemed to be further back than they should have been... that sort of thing.
But even with those few "hiccups" it was still very cool... and well worth a lookie-loo...
Now, the movie alone gets a solid 3 in the yani rating system, and the whole 3D experience both lost it and gained it points... so, it kind of comes out in the same place as it started...
yani's rating: 3 three dimensional vampires out of 5
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