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 The outrageously imaginative world in Meet the Robinsons will come to dazzling life in groundbreaking Disney Digital 3D on March 30th. In the film, the brilliant 12-year-old Lewis invents a number of surprising, clever gadgets, the latest and most ambitious of which is the Memory Scanner. Lewis hopes the Scanner will retrieve early memories of his mother and maybe even reveal why she put him up for adoption, but before he can get his answer, his invention is stolen by the dastardly Bowler Hat Guy and his diabolical hat, Doris. Lewis has all but given up hope when he meets a mysterious boy from the future named Wilbur Robinson, who whisks them off in a time machine. The two travel forward in time where Lewis discovers the amazing secret of the Robinson family.
Having pioneered the high-tech rebirth of 3D with the release of the animated hit Chicken Little, Disney now takes a major leap ahead with Meet the Robinsons, both in terms of more sophisticated 3D storytelling and the opportunity for a far wider audience to enjoy the state-of-the-art 3D experience. Stereoscopic supervisor Phil “Captain 3D” McNally, who studied furniture design at the Royal College of Art in London, took a two-day course in holography that introduced him to stereo-photography. After learning to make holograms, he put two cameras together and started taking images, later getting hired as an animator at Industrial Light and Magic. When Chicken Little came along, McNally says that the two worlds lined up nicely, and he’s been perfecting the art ever since.
{quote_top}“The difference between this and Chicken Little has been the opportunity to art direct the depth,” McNally tells MediaBlvd Magazine. “Chicken Little was more one size fits all, so whatever the shot was, it more or less fit into the same box. What we’ve done with Meet the Robinsons is look at a shot and say, for example, ‘Okay, it’s the first time we go to the future city, and that city is the biggest, deepest, highest city that we’ve ever seen before.’ We saved some of the depth in the beginning of the movie, so that the first time we go to the city, we’ve got somewhere to open it up. Everyone’s behind the frame and it’s all composed, and then, suddenly, things start to break apart. What we’ve been able to do is look at the film, shot to shot, sequence to sequence, and develop what I call the depth script, which is a graph for the whole movie where you can say, ‘Okay, this is going to be a big sequence. Now, we’re going to bring it back and let people recover and calm down, and then, we’re going to break out of it again.’ That’s what’s different from the 3D movies that we’ve had so far.”
 Producer Dorothy McKim, who has been involved with the film since December of 2003, explains that, in the beginning, they were concentrating more on the mono version of the film, but always kept the knowledge that they would be making it 3D in the back of their head. “When Phil McNally jumped on and really started spear-heading the whole project, he educated myself and (director) Stephen J. Anderson, explaining the 3D process of stereoscopic, what that means, what the shots are that you want to make wow shots, and just educated us about the whole process, which was fantastic. It really helped Steve be able to concentrate on making the mono version, while knowing the 3D version would happen, because he had the eyes and ears of Phil through that partnership.”
For his first directing job, as well as his first foray into computer animation, Anderson was excited to make the transition from the hand-drawn animation world. “I am so taken by this medium of computer animation,” he says. “I love animation of all sorts, but to get to learn this new tool, this new way of making movies, has been really exciting and I can’t wait to do it again.”
{quote_middle}Of utmost importance to Anderson was not to resort to gimmicks, but instead rely on having a good story that the technology could enhance. “For me, story is always the thing. If you don’t have that, you just have a lot of cool visuals in 3D. We have the most talented group of filmmakers making animated movies at Disney, and their work is always going to be stunning, but if you don’t have a good story, you’ll have a lot of stunning work, but you’re not going to have much of a foundation. When people leave the theater, they’re not going to be remembering your movie. It’s the story, the comedy, the fantastically human characters that they’ll remember. Having a really emotional journey that the characters go on is the number one priority with these movies.”
In preparing for the stereoscopic process, McNally says that he has to think about the movie as if it were on a soundstage with real sets. “It’s much more like a theatrical experience, in that you’re literally seeing the people, relative to each other in space. With stereoscopic movie making, you’re literally able to put depth between the characters and separate things out, pull them together or push them back, and make the city look big, or see the bowl hat fly up through the rafters and really feel like you’re up there.”
 McKim reveals that the biggest challenge of Meet the Robinsons was working with animated humans, but keeping them from looking too human on screen. “We wanted to keep a cartoon animated look with them and with the textures on their skin. The hair was a challenge for us, but I think we’ve accomplished what we wanted to accomplish. I think it looks phenomenal. It was great because we actually finished the movie at the end of January, and by mid-February we had finished with the stereoscopics, so it wasn’t that much greater of an effort to finish, and it was only a couple of weeks behind.”
{quote_bottom}The filmmakers are hoping Meet the Robinsons is successful, as Anderson would love to be able to make a sequel. “I love these characters,” he declares. “The thing I love the most about the movie are these characters. I feel like they’re my family and my best friends. I’m very excited to get the movie out into the world and let everyone see it. Hopefully, audiences will embrace the characters as much as I have. I’m going to miss them being in my life, like they have been for the last 4 ½ years. It’s hard to see them go and have them belong to everybody else. It’s exciting, but at the same time, I feel like I’m going to miss seeing their faces every day. I would love to think that I’ll get to see them again, and get to play in these worlds again.” |
