A Stereo Time Paradox
Meet the Robinsons Advances 3-D Cinema

I was fortunate enough last night (March 16) to be at the very first
public screening of Meet the Robinsons projected in “Disney Digital
3-D” at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood. It was a combination
press and family/friends screening with director Steve Anderson and
producer Dorothy McKim in person introducing the film.

Based on the children’s book A Day with Wilbur Robinson by William
Joyce, the computer-generated movie has, in director Anderson’s words,
“a whole bunch of other stuff” that has been added to round out the
story. Anderson was adopted as a child, so he brings a lot of
identification to this story of an orphan and his search through time
for a family. The orphan is Lewis, a genius IQ child inventor, who was
left at the door of an orphanage as an infant. To find his mother,
Lewis invents a memory scanner to retrieve the image of her from his
own brain. When Wilbur Robinson, a mysterious young man, appears at a
science fair at Lewis’s school, the adventure in time begins.

The individual characters in Robinsons are computer-rendered in a
cartoon style but they are set within the confines of a very realistic
looking world. Throughout the narrative the 3-D effects are pleasing
and dynamic, changing with greater or lesser amounts of depth behind
the screen, according to the demands of the story. Plenty of elements,
particularly an ingenious flying bowler hat of Lewis’s invention, fly
out into the audience space in a natural, and humorous manner.
Stereoscopic elements reinforce the humor in the story in big and small
ways. When the bungling “oil-can Harry” villain named only Bowler Hat
Guy, for example, gets his nose trapped beneath a lowered window, the
3-D tweak lends extra humor to the moment.

When the narrative launches into the future with a flying machine that
circles out along the way into the theater space, the richly-colored
vistas of the imaginatively rendered city deepen out behind the screen
with greater 3-D. The fluid depth effects, created under the guidance
of stereoscopic supervisor Phil ‘Captain 3D’ McNally, include
techniques such as animation of the stereo window, what Lenny Lipton,
CTO of RealD, in a recent paper has designated as “Vertical Surround
Parallax Correction.” At no time, however, do the 3-D effects call
attention to themselves but are consistenly used in service of the
story. The deepest moments in the movie take place with a rapid thrill
ride through a brief but surprisingly dystopian urbanscape
inadvertently contrived by Bowler Hat Guy.

The 3-D effects in Meet the Robinsons represent a considerable advance
for McNally beyond his initial efforts with stereoscopic conversion of
Chicken Little at Industrial Light and Magic. Serious 3-D
contributions were also made by Brian ‘vfxdoctor’ Gardner and Bernard
Mendiburu working on stereoscopic layouts. Stereoscopic software for
the project was developed by Paul Allen Newell.

We are reaching the end of a cycle of 3-D feature films repurposed to
stereo from pre-existing projects . We are at the dawn of an epoch when
stereoscopic features will be built from the ‘ground up’ specifically
for 3-D narratives in the language of the “z-axis." The new 3-D
stories will be built for deep vistas behind the screen and wide open
air in the audience space. I can hardly wait.

-- Ray 3D Zone

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