Tuesday was clearly 3D Day at the 35th Annual ShoWest conference in Las Vegas with most of the delegates having to regularly put on and take off the designated RealD glasses that were supplied to them when they registered.
Disney’s Digital 3D presentation had attendants lined up all the way down the long halls of the Paris Hotel, waiting to get into Le Theatre Des Arts to see what Disney President Mark Zoradi had to show them from Disney’s impressive slate of 3D titles for the coming years. Disney has no less than 17 films in various stages of production that will be released in Digital 3D from Pixar’s Up through movies that have barely started production like Disney’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s King of the Elves and Pixar’s newt–neither of which are expected until 2012–as well as the Robert Zemeckis produced motion capture animated film Mars Needs Moms! and Tim Burton’s feature length version of his short Frankenweenie.
3D trailers were shown for Up and the Jerry Bruckheimer family adventure G-Force, as well as “Tokyo Mater,” one of the series of special 3D “Cars-Toons” that John Lasseter directed to lead up to the release of Cars 2 on June 24, 2011. (Zoradi mentioned that there will be more of these featuring the film’s automotive stars Lightning McQueen and Mater the tow truck.)
Concept art for Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was shown, the former giving the audience a first look at the look of Ebenezer Scrooge as performed by Jim Carrey (who also plays the ghosts that visit Scrooge on Christmas Eve), while the latter showed some of the environments Alice will encounter, including a gate overrun by shrubbery with animal-shaped foliage not unlike the ones in Edward Scissorhands. There were also some concept designs for character she meets on the way like the Cheshire Cat, the Rabbit, the Caterpillar, and the White Queen as played by Anne Hathaway. They were deliberately a little more vague with the images of Helena Bonham Carter’s The Queen of Hearts, who was only shown as a pair of stylish boots, and Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter, whose face was obscured by his trademark chapeau.
After Mark Zoradi finished, he introduced director Pete Docter, who came out to present the first 47 minutes of his new movie Up, similar to what was done at New York Comic-Con and WonderCon over the past few months (you can read our brief write-up here). When it was over, he came out to present one more action clip from later in the movie in which Carl, Russell, Kevin (the colorful bird) and Doug (the talking dog) are pursued by the “bad dogs,” while still pulling Carl’s “house zeppelin” behind them.
In the clip, the old man and his young tag along run from out of a cave, followed by literally hundreds of dogs. The entire scene takes place within a rocky environment, almost like an underground cave within a mountain. They see Doug, who calls them over to the side of a cliff over which Carl and Russell jump, using the floating house to allow them to gently float down to the area below. They continue to run, at one point the duo jumping on Kevin’s back and riding him to stay ahead of the snarling and snapping dogs. The hardest part is getting the floating house through the rocky underground caverns, as the balloons start popping and they get into an area where they have to pull the entire house to the side to avoid a large rock structure. As they try to escape, Doug says “I will stop them!” and he tries to convince the dogs to stop but they ignore him and run past. The doberman Alpha then picks Doug up by the scruff of his neck with his teeth and tosses him over the side – but he lands fine below. At one point towards the end of the clip, Russell falls off the edge of the cliff and he’s flying around from the rope tied around his waist, as shown in the most recent trailer.
Afterwards, RealD had a special luncheon and presentation for Sony Pictures Animation’s upcoming 3D animated movie based on Judi Barrett’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which involves an invention that creates food that falls from the sky. The Paris Ballroom was decorated especially for the occasion with a giant spaghetti and meatball laced archway over the entrance door and standees of all the various characters including some of the lesser known side characters like police officer Earl Devereaux, someone named Brent and Mayor Shelbourne.
Besides showing the 3D trailer, which recently premiered on DreamWorks Animation’s Monsters vs. Aliens, they also showed two extended clips from scenes in the trailer. Since they were shown chronologically out of order, we’ll start with the second one first.
It’s the scene where inventor Flint Lockwood, voiced by Bill Hader, first meets weather girl Sam Sparks, voiced by Anna Farris. Flint is sitting on the steps under a dock with his “monkey thought translator” Steve moping about the latest failure of an invention. Sam walks up to the dock with a microphone and throws it into the water, then sits down, accidentally kicking Flint in the head. She’s obviously upset about something, and he inquires why and she tells him that some crazy inventor’s rocket made her lose her job. They talk a little and she notices his odd shoes, which she’s amazed to learn are “Spray-on shoes” (to avoid shoelace tying incidents) and she also notes his companion, which gets her more excited. Being that Sam seems so knowledgeable about stuff, Flint is immediately smitten, but she then quickly realizes that he’s the inventor that made her lose her job.
Before they can get too far into the ensuing argument, something falls from the sky near them, a pickle, and something else falls into a nearby trash pail. Flint walks over and peers in to see a slice of cheese before one of his “ratbirds” (seen in the teaser) swoops in and grabs it in its beak. Before Flint can react, the cloud burst open and it starts raining hamburgers, and we see a montage of various characters with their mouths wide open as the hamburgers start plummeting from the sky, then back to Flint and Sam, as he stands on the dock with his own mouth open and arms spread wide to the rain of hamburgers, excited by the fact that his invention actually worked. He grabs one of the hamburgers as it falls and takes a bite, and Sam seems just as thrilled, especially when he reminds her that she’s a weather girl.
The first clip shown (which obviously happens later in the movie) shows Flint walking through a field with Sam–the “remote TV” seen in the trailer pops out of the grass and runs off–and he nervously tells her that they’re just walking together “as friends” but then they arrive at a clearing and we see the giant green Jello castle that’s featured in the new teaser trailer. Sam gushes how she loves Jello but Flint says that because she didn’t put in a request for the food she wanted, he went to the trouble of forming the Jello into the mold himself. He walks through one of the walls and motions for Sam to follow. Inside, he has created an entire palace with everything made of Jello–including a grand piano and statues that look like Sam. Obviously, Flint is quite obsessed with Sam–in a slightly creepy way if you ask us–but she seems unphased, and the two start frolicking within the Jello palace bouncing off the floors and taking bites out of a statue, ending with the scene from the teaser trailer where she does a cannonball and he does a belly flop.
Up comes out on May 29, while Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs opens on September 18.
