Annecy 2010 (1/2): features and old fashioned 3D effects

This year’s Annecy experience was a little different for me. Not because with its 34th edition the festival celebrated its 50th anniversary, but because I came relatively late to the party (not too many tickets left) and was only able to stay for two days due to current work assignments. This is also the reason why my promised Dumbo posts have been postponed. They are just delayed, not forgotten though, so please keep coming back here.


Traditionally I like to see as many animated features in competition as possible because most of them are not getting an international cinema release afterwards. This year I’ve only managed to see The Fantastic Mr. Fox (which still isn’t available in Switzerland), so I cannot tell if its award for best feature in competition was justified. I liked it although it somehow fell short of my expectations.

I finally saw Don Hahn’s Waking Sleeping Beauty (missing the first 15 minutes due to a misunderstanding). Hahn did a fine job even if he didn’t have time to explore some of the more interesting issues. There’s nothing much for me to say about it except that I agree with most of what Michael Barrier and Michael Sporn have written about it. I was probably most surprised that animators were not labelled yet every executive was. Or as Michael Sporn writes:

“Yet the story being told - without an iota of fat - is the story of the above-the-line players and how they felt about each other. […] Only a couple of times do we really get to imagine how the artists felt about what was going on. There’s a meeting called by Katzenberg to talk about how the people felt about the period. They explained that they weren’t able to spend appropriate time with their families because of all the excess overtime that was demanded of them. Katzenberg tears up and promises that things will get better. They don’t; things get worse.“

3D backlash sold as state of the art
Then I attended the avant-première of a Belgian children’s film called Les aventures extraordinaires de Samy. The director’s claims that this film was exclusively made to be seen in 3D were more than justified. Just when you think that 3D has finally grown out of throwing things at the audience, a veritable “fourth-wall breaker” comes along that works much better as an overdimensioned rollercoaster than the uneventful story about the coming-of-age of a cutesy ocean turtle would suggest. And yes, there are these moments where a small fish is swimming towards you out of the screen (Jaws 3-D, 1983, came to mind) or a harpoon is causing you to wince in your seat.

But the 3D really works in communicating size relations: for a long stretch the turtles are out on the ocean with little else to compare their sizes to. In these scenes the three-dimensional images not only emphasize the camera position close to the water surface but also show how small these turtles are.

It was no coincidence that Samy resembles an overlong IMAX-presentation because its production company nWave Pictures and director Ben Stassen have been doing exactly that kind of IMAX show films for years (Wild Safari 3D, Fly me to the moon). While the turtles swim all over the world and still always meet the same few characters, environmental issues are present in several scenes but never really affect the protagonists or the audience, for that matter. Spilling oil and the destruction of the Amazon forest just serve as colorful backdrops. Overall, the narrative contains no real obstacles, it all just floats along without real conflict. Seeing that without the benefits of 3D-effects would be about as interesting as seeing Magic Journeys (1975) or Captain EO (1986) in 2D. Besides, it was obvious that the presented French language track was dubbed and not the original version.

French Dubbing was also the reason why I didn’t catch the first two Toy Story movies although I would have been able to get tickets. Even though I enjoyed Samy for what it was, the fact that this year’s main 3D attractions were upgraded regular movies and an old-fashioned effects-rollercoaster made me about as enthusiastic about the future of 3D like the prospects that Brad Bird is leaving animation for MI:IV and Pixar’s next few movies are sequels. I'm still looking forward to Toy Story 3 however, if only for its Michael Arndt screenplay.

To get an impression of what makes Annecy so special, read this official blog entry.