IMAGINE if Oscar voters in 1939 saw The Wizard of Oz only in black and white. Would they have nominated the film for best picture and best visual effects if the yellow brick road were just another shade of grey?
The filmmakers behind the latest 3D movies face just such a dilemma. Films in 3D require academy members to drive to a cinema, rather than just pop a DVD into their home players, to see the full depth of the work that went into them. But with a bumper crop of 3D films up for award consideration, it’s not clear how many Oscar voters will make that effort.
”We came out of last year’s award season having Avatar overshadow everything,” says Jim Chabin, president of the International 3D Society, a non-profit organisation that gives its own awards to 3D movies. ”This year has been scrappy.”
Visually ambitious 3D movies released this year include Toy Story 3, Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, Tangled and Tron.
Whether in animation or live action, 3D adds a level of difficulty for filmmakers, particularly in the category of special effects.
Most critics agreed 3D was deployed with particular dexterity in How to Train Your Dragon, an animated film about a teenage Viking who develops a special bond with a monster. The movie’s swooping, kinetic flying scenes earned praise from the Los Angeles Times film critic Betsy Sharkey, who called them ”a study in how nuance can actually complement the spectacle we’ve come to demand of 3D animation”.
While parts of the film left him cold, the Herald’s Paul Byrnes praised its ”thrilling flying sequences that make the movie enormous fun”.
DreamWorks Animation released How to Train Your Dragon in cinemas in March and began holding 3D screenings for members of the academy and various guilds in mid-August. But its directors, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, must walk a fine line between exhorting their peers to see their movie in 3D and just hoping they watch it at all.
”If they have the chance to, we hope people will see it in 3D,” DeBlois says. ”There was a lot of effort put into the 3D experience and making it part of the storytelling and not just gimmickry.”
The 3D technology is still controversial among the industry’s artistic elite, most of whom have yet to make a 3D movie. ”For the academy, there’s some interest, but it’s somewhat divided because there are too many projects that come out where 3D is just used as a diversion,” DeBlois says.
Shoddy 3D has tainted the perception of the format. Many academy members are old enough to remember movies such as Jaws 3-D (1983) or The House of Wax (1953), which relied on a more rudimentary technology to create the impression of objects jumping off the screen.
”This digital 3D today is a completely different technical standard, and the storytelling can be done far more subtly,” Chabin says. ”But people have those memories, and it’s difficult to change those perceptions.”
More recently, the trend of conversions from 2D to 3D has raised hackles in the industry, with Clash of the Titans drawing criticism for its rushed, second-rate work. That kind of bad buzz can taint other conversions, like Alice in Wonderland, which underwent a much longer, more painstaking process.
The year The Wizard of Oz was released marked a major change at the Oscars; the creation of separate categories for colour and black-and-white cinematography, a distinction that endured until 1967. It’s unlikely, says Chabin, that the academy will introduce a 3D-specific category any time soon.
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