Hola all. Massawyrm here.

Watching Coraline is like gazing into the future of projected cinema. For years we’ve heard rumblings coming from the James Cameron camp and the various satellites circling him about how 3-D was going to change the way we watch movies. How it was going to give people a reason to step away from their 42” Plasma TV’s, their Blu-Ray players and their $1000 Bose Stereo sound systems to once again get an experience they cannot duplicate at home. But as much as we keep seeing the occasional modern 3-D film, first with Spy Kids 3, then soon followed by Disney animated films and ultimately the lushly filmed concerts starring U2 and Miley Cyrus, nothing yet has managed to seem more than just the same old movies with a gimmick. The same gimmick that seems to rear its ugly head every 25 years or so.

But that is all about to change. Not that there won’t be room for gimmicky films like My Bloody Valentine that aim to use 3D simply as a tool to throw eyeballs and point shotguns at the audience – but soon we’re going to see a new kind of director take the field. The visual masterminds who will make 3D films that don’t walk out into the audience, but instead beckon the audience into a world they’ve never before experienced.

Coraline is like dragged headlong down the rabbit hole; it’s a fever dream that lets you, for a brief time, live within the world of Rankin-Bass models and landscapes. There aren’t simply images on top of other images – it looks like a world full of authentic depth. One image that simply melted my brain was of the heroine Coraline sitting in a theatre full of Scotty dogs, each sitting politely in its own seat, with each row in its own field of depth. Another, Coraline exploring a magnificent otherworldly garden, feels spectacularly alien with every element looking like it existed perfectly on the other side of the screen. The effect wasn’t about throwing things out at you or giving perspective on the placement of objects. It was about putting you in that theater, in that garden, to look around and explore on your own.

The images and trailers we keep posting don’t do this film justice at all. They simply look like exactly like the level of work you’ve come to expect from Henry Selick – which is of course masterful. But these peeks cannot capture a fraction of just how magical this thing looks with glasses on. It’s breathtaking, and easily one of the most visually arresting things I’ve seen in quite some time. Selick was the perfect guy to play around with this technology as his brain is already wrapped around the third dimension. He lives in this world, builds entire vistas in it and then films them to be projected upon a flat surface. Now, for the first time, he’s walking us through the world as he gets to see it. And he is proving to be the first in a new wave of directors who will think about the medium in a new and different way. If this technology progresses and continues to catch on (as many hope) then it will be guys like Selick who understand how to create these worlds, rather than simply shooting it flat and using computers bring specific items into the foreground.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough of the film to truly get a sense of how the story will play out. I certainly was wrapped up in almost every frame of what they were showing, but the scenes they brought were incongruous and it wasn’t like many of the other presentations in which we simply watched a chunk of the film. If the sections connecting these are as good as what I saw, this will be that critically acclaimed family film that finds its way towards being a modern classic. If they don’t, it will still end up a very beautiful experiment.

The footage left me excited and optimistic. I now understand why the guys have had this on their radar for so long.

Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.

Massawyrm

Got something for the Wyrm? Mail it here.

\