One of the strangest one-day-to-the-next experiences I had at Fantastic Fest was seeing around four hours of Toy Story one afternoon and then four hours of Love Exposure the next day in the same time slot. I'll get into Love Exposure soon enough, but the recent news that the Toy Story 3-D Double Feature is remaining in theaters for a bit longer finally kicked me into gear completing my Fantastic Fest coverage.
If you've missed the double feature 3-D version so far, make sure to catch it before it disappears. This recommendation goes double if you paid to take kids to Monsters Vs Aliens. There's got to be some justice in box office receipts favoring quality.
Dimensionality is what set Pixar apart from the pack when Toy Story changed the animation landscape in 1995. That's precisely why I don't feel this is some cheap gimmick and see it as a finer-tuned, enhanced version of two movies I already love. The 3-D application here for me is as wholesome as using brighter projection bulbs than existed when a film existed. We're talking about fine-detail depth, not goofy stuff shooting out at you.
Just as with UP, I'm fine seeing these movies "flat" rather than "deep", but there's something truly majestic about the 3-D presentation. The application isn't full of things flying at you, but rather, it adds a moving diorama feel to the proceedings that indeed more comprehensively immerses you in the action. I like the right applications of pop-up-in-your-face, but not when or if that is added to a movie that didn't have it to begin with. If anything, movies like these that are depth-of-field rendered are returning to their source files more than anything, and a case could be made that this is a more accurate and pure presentation of what the original animators sculpted with digital scalpels.
The youngest of kids in the audience had trouble maintaining focus through the second feature, but they all behaved in general. The young guy next to me with his dad couldn't have been much more than 5 or 6, and had a Nintendo DS in his hands prior to the feature with some LEGO videos on it that he thought were the funniest thing in the world. I saw the first Toy Story when I was 12, when I'd moved on from toys and was into girls.
This kid was already over physical toys and into digital gadgets before he'd gotten multiplication down pat! The digital information divide has made some of the most recent generations like different species to me. I'm still trying to wrap the fact that high schoolers and middle schoolers are using smartphone computers that fit in their pockets at ages when laptop computers were new and remarkable gadgets to me. I'm very curious to see how parents, adults, and kids of various ages take to the new movie next summer, especially relative to how Pixar has evolved and matured so beautifully throughout their first couple decades.
Speaking of Toy Story 3, the trailer looks wonderful on the big screen in 3-D. Seeing it and thinking about the themes it teases while watching the first two movies makes for a really rich new experience.