And if he falls in love tonight

[austin_dern]

I suppose it's all but exited theaters but I did see the 3-D version of The Lion King, in parallel to bunny_hugger seeing it, and had some thoughts to share. I'm incidentally glad the movie did return to theaters; it used to be part of The Way Things Are that Disney would re-release one of its classic animated pictures as counterpoint to grinding out, say, The Fox And The Hound, and while nearly everything may be available nearly all the time these days, it isn't the same. Even if Disney does put some cartoons ``in the vault'' before selling the newest videotape/DVD/Blu-Ray edition. (Do they? I remember it producing still funny arguments online, as all arguments online are funny.)

The thing about the 3-D conversion, here, is that it seems well-meant. It just doesn't work, not consistently. Some scenes adapt very well, particularly ones that try to show the awesome space of the Pridelands. If this 3-D craze established anything it's that the real power of 3-D in movies is not thrusting things out at the screen but letting space recede into infinity, and with scenes that were meant to convey immense distance the treatment is good.

What doesn't work are figures, particularly characters moving swiftly. Often, if characters are static, the treatments of shadows and lines lets the characters seem to have some natural bulk, although Mufasa and Adult Simba's eyes still looked like divots gouged into steel. But when a character moves, particularly moves fast as Timon often does, the distortion of the figure --- which looks so natural in the 2-D rendering --- means the shapes fall apart into their component bulges.

I think that's a fault of trying to paste 3-D effects on what were designed as 2-D figures, and that had the movie been designed from the start with 3-D in mind the animation would have fit better. (In support of this, there's a scene with Timon, Pumbaa, and Nala talking, and Timon elbows Pumbaa. In 2-D the scene reads perfectly; in 3-D, the characters are at different distances from the camera, and Timon nudges the space in front of Pumbaa instead.) And I'd like to see the experiment done, if anyone still bothers with hand-drawn animation, and if anyone still bothers with 3-D movies until the next time the fad goes around.

Trivia: The multi-plane camera Walt Disney studios constructed, and first used for the 1937 short The Old Mill, cost $70,000 to build and stood fourteen feet high. Source: Of Mice And Magic: A History Of American Animated Cartoons, Leonard Maltin.

Currently Reading: Come On Down: Behind The Big Doors At The Price Is Right, Stan Blits, with an introduction to make it look like the whole book might be by Bob Barker.

PS: Also, What's Remarkable About Naming Sixty?, which doesn't quite get answered. Should have an answer shortly, though.

Comments

[moxie_man]

Your summary pretty well explains what I figured would happen if anyone attempted to redo an older animation film into 3D. Glad I haven't bothered to go see it.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I tried to go see a 2D showing today and forgot my wallet. They only offer one 2D showing per day, so that was very disappointing.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, no. That's terribly disappointing.

The 2-D run isn't any longer than the 3-D run, is it?

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

The 2D run barely exists: the theaters in town both show it only once per day (10:40 a.m. in one theater and 1:55 p.m. in the other) and when I checked surrounding cities, most of them had no 2D showings at all. The closest theater I could find showing any at all in 2D outside my own city was an hour away.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's strange there's so little of a 2-D run. I mean, I know they want to get costs back on the 3-D treatment, and believe that the 3-D premium will earn them more money, but once a day is bizarrely low. (The Brick AMC doesn't seem to be running it in 2-D at all!)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I think the experiment was probably worth trying, although it really ought to have been proved out on a short cartoon first, instead. And, heck, it is an excuse for looking at a very cinematic movie on an actual movie screen.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

From what I'm hearing of the overall furry community, the agreement is that 3-D doesn't add that much too it. It's just a bit of an excuse for re-release. Someone's tweet about it I found apt: "Furries will pay to see it as long as Nala still makes bedroom eyes."

In general 3-D planned form the get-go seems to work better than grafted 3-D. You have to pump up the colors to handle some of the reduced saturation, and plan scenes, and such. Coraline worked well in that regard.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, there's still the bedroom eyes there. I guess the real question is when will the 3-D Lilo and Stitch come out.

I should mention, one consistent rule about the 3-D add-on was that the computer-animated effects adapted perfectly, as is probably inevitable. They probably had the 3-D geometry already there from the start, at least implicitly.