Despicable Me and 3-D.

Referring to Mark Kermode's opinions on 3-D in films and to the 3-D debate in general I would like to throw in my 10 cents worth based on my viewing of Despicable Me in 3-D the other week with my 11-year old daughter. My only experience of 3-D up to now was of the old-fashioned 1950s black and rouge effort, The Creature From the Black Lagoon.  The 3-D effect then was momentarily entertaining but hardly mindblowing and I don't think there was anyone of my generation who could believe that 3-D would go any further.

I am a cartoon fan, but there are things I like about them and things I don't.  What I don't like about them are the flatness of the colours and lack of believable contrast. Watching who killed Roger Rabbit that combined the human and cartoon worlds exposed these deficiencies most clearly.  What I do like about the old fashioned cartoon experience is the way in which you get more movement and more space for a particular action. It is one of the reasons for their grace and lyricism: more frames than our eye would normally follow.   In the old Disney style, you were led through the extended gestures from beginning to end, drawing you into the strange world and making its physics understandable.  The modern 2-dimensional age of animation comes upon us with things like Ice- Age in which the frantic pace and energy comes from removing frames from the movements so that they become mere staccato flashes on the screen without logical connectivity between the beginning and the end.  A gesture is there now there now there, like quantum energy jumps.

3-D in cartoons, however,  opens out the frame, brings in more space and light and demands once again that movements have a middle; becoming comprehensible, and by doing so, becoming more emotionally involving.  A genuine emotion for the story becomes possible because some of the necessary components are in the 3-D image.  So I found myself approving of this 3-D process as exemplified in Despicable Me.

Before the movie showing, however, there was a 3-D trailer for a film with humans in it. It was clear immediately that 3-D added nothing to the humans in the frame at all. If anything the humans floated in the frame unattached to their environment.  They were no more real and possibly were less real with the 3-D process, and the freedom of the extra dimension on its own gave was simply not capable of greater emotional scope than normally exists in film.  Nothing was added to the film experience.  So my feelings agree with what one actually might expect from pondering what the 3-D process can and cannot do in a film.  It improves the fake but not the real. Our minds do a much better job of combining images from our eyes and making physical and emotional sense out of 2-D projections than any film process trying to improve upon it.