Odds & Ends

Monday, January 12, 2009

3-D or not 3-D?

I saw Bolt the other day. I won't get a chance to review it properly, but I will note for the record that it's enjoyable without being especially memorable. It's a testament to the professionalism of the creative people at Pixar / Disney: having torn the film down and rebuilt it halfway through production, they still made it slick and fun and involving. Nevertheless, there's an unmistakable by-the-numbers feel about it: there's not much sense that anyone had any real passion for this story. Toy Story, you sensed, reflected real interests of John Lasseter; The Incredibles unmistakably meant something to Brad Bird; and Finding Nemo's story doubtless had personal meaning to Andrew Stanton. But with Bolt the original director was gone, and it really feels like they only made the film because they didn't want to write off all the story development. So it's fun, but passionless.

The most interesting thing about it is actually the 3-D. I have seen a few reviews, like Jim Schembri's and Stuart Wilson's, really complement the process. I'm afraid, however, that I don't buy it. It's true that it's way better than old 1950s red-blue 3-D, but that's faint praise. Beyond the novelty value, does it actually improve the movie experience?

Having seen a couple of movies in 3-D in recent years now, I don't think so. I said this when I reviewed Beowulf, and David Bordwell made similar comments in response to that film:

I'd go farther and say that 3-D hasn't improved significantly since the 1950s. It ought to work: just replicate the eyes' binocular disparity by setting two cameras at the proper interval or, now, by manipulating perspective with software. Yet in films 3-D has always looked weirdly wrong. It creates a cardboardy effect, capturing surfaces but not volumes. Real objects in depth have bulk, but in these movies, objects are just thin planes, slices of space set at different distances from us. If our ancestors had seen the world the way it looks in these movies, they probably wouldn't have left many descendants.

It would take a perceptual psychologist to explain why 3-D looks fake. Whatever the cause, I'd speculate that good old 2-D cinema is better at suggesting volumes exactly because the cues to depth are less specific and so we can fill in the somewhat ambiguous array.

By the way, in watching a 3-D movie I seem to go through stages. First, there's some adjustment to this very weird stimulus: I can't easily focus on the whole image and movement seems excessively fuzzy. Then adaptation settles in and I can see the 2 1/4-D image pretty well. But adaptation carries me further and by the end of the movie I seem to see the image as less dimensional and more simply 2-D; the effects aren't as striking. But maybe this is just me.

I don't know about the "surfaces" versus "volumes" thing (I've only noticed this as a severe problem on films retrofitted to 3-D, and there seems no theoretical reason why a 3-D animated film couldn't perfectly calculate the required offset for each lens) but otherwise think Bordwell is spot on about the experience of watching 3-D. I'm not aware of any research about the reception to 3-D that looks rigorously at things like audience involvement and immersion when watching 3-D; there surely must be some, but a cursory search didn't reveal any, and Bordwell (a leading cognitive film theorist) seems to have been unaware of any when he wrote the above a year or so ago.

So here's my unscientific assessment of my own response. Obviously, there's a benefit in terms of the gee-whiz factor; and in moments like the big chase that opens Bolt, there's a visceral rush from whizzing between and around buildings and vehicles. At a simple level, restoring dimensionality would seem to make the experience more immersive because it literally is more immersive, and because the 3-D aspect mimics the way we see the real world, where we do get depth cues from our binocular vision.

On the other hand, there are other ways in which conventional 2-D cinema better reproduces our everyday viewing experience. We don't have to wear glasses (other than those that we wear every day). We don't have to worry about how we position our head: as I noted in the Beowulf review, if you don't sit with your eyes level, the effect "breaks." I also find that the 3-D glasses darken and discolour the image; Bolt was a computer animated film, and one would normally expect bright primary colours, but I found it looked dark and muddy with the glasses on. (Is this an exhibition problem? Are exhibitors supposed to crank up the light levels to counter for the glasses?) I think these problems actually outweigh the benefits of 3-D, since our eyes are so used to decoding 2-D images, and do so with great ease.

More intriguingly though, I think there's something subtly but actively distancing about 3-D. I referred to the excitement of the action scenes, but I think that excitement is akin to being on a ride: you're responding at a base level to the sensation of flight and fast movement. This isn't unique to 3-D of course - action movies do this all the time - but the effect is more pronounced in 3-D. Years ago, in an undergraduate essay, I referred in a different context to the distinction between "digetic [meaning, roughly, story-based] excitement" and "non-diegetic [non-story based] excitement." It's basically the difference between watching a movie and saying Watch Out Bolt! or watching the same scene and saying Wow, That's Cool!.

We always tend to experience a bit of both when watching a thrill-ride of a movie. However, I think 3-D, by playing on quite instinctive cues (for example, to duck when something flies towards us) favours non-diegetic excitement at the expense of diegetic excitement. It makes us more aware of our own presence in the theatre, emphasising a first-person perspective and repsonse, where we flinch at what is shooting towards us. 2-D provides a certain "distance" for the viewer, which means we don't become as self-conscious of our own position, and instead respond more purely to the narrative: we worry about what happens to Bolt (or whoever) rather than experience the movie as something happening to us. Paradoxically, I think 3-D may be more distancing and less immersive than 2-D.

Labels: 3-D, animation, bordwell, commentary, pixar, theory