Meet the Robinsons....in 3D!

Yesterday I had the privilege of seeing a fantastic new film, "Meet the Robinsons", in 3D no less! It's a computer-animated film produced by the newly-reformed Disney animation department, now headed up by Pixar luminary John Lasseter.

First, the film was excellent. Even without the 3D, it's still a great movie. Disney really paid attention to the story this time. It seemed that for a long time, Disney actually stopped caring about their audience and was just producing animated movies for the sake of hopefully stumbling upon a cash cow. Unfortunately, almost all of the Disney animated films of the past decade missed the mark and it seemed that the magic of Disney was lost...again. John Lasseter may as well be the spiritual successor to Walt Disney himself, revolutionizing the art of animation for modern audiences.

"Meet the Robinsons" is about an orphaned child genius who has been tapped by a mysterious time-traveling boy from thirty years in the future to help foil the plans of an evil time bandit with a robotic bowler hat. There are many surprises about the nature of all the characters in the film, most of which I didn't see coming.

The movie is funny, clever, and inspirational. "Keep Moving Forward" is repeated many times in the film, which was taken from a quote from Walt Disney himself. That's a good philosophy! Where were movies like this when I was a kid? This is a great movie for kids and I think that everyone who sees it will be affected by it's positive message.

Now for the 3D....this is nothing short of incredible. The process is amazing and works perfectly. Polarization is the key. Basically, the film is digitally projected at 144 frames per second, six times faster than conventional theatrical films. A special filter in front of the projector changes the polarization of the light emanating from the projector every other frame. Every second, 72 frames are polarized in one direction and the other 72 frames are polarized in another. The audience wears special plastic 3d glasses with polarization filters. Wearing the glasses, the left eye can only see images polarized one way, and the right eye can see images polarized the other. Because of persistence of vision, it looks smooth and fluid, even though the left eye/right eye perspective is cycling very rapidly. The end result is a 3D film with incredible color and incredible depth.

Last year, only about 100 theaters nationwide were equipped to exhibit polarized 3d movies. I read on wikipedia that Meet the Robinsons is showing in over 600 theaters nationwide in 3D. This technology is on fire! It's saturation increased SIX TIMES in just a few months. It really is an incredible process and I hope you get the opportunity to experience it.

Overall, Meet the Robinsons is a great film. Now that Disney has raised the bar on animation, I hope they are able to develop more quality films like it. I leave you with the Walt Disney quote from the film:

“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
–Walt Disney