When Disney’s highly anticipated “Moana 2” is released in around 4,000 theaters later this week, roughly 2,000 of the screens allocated to the movie will be 3D. This might come as something of a surprise – the 3D exhibition isn’t promoted on the movie’s poster or included as a talking point in any of the pre-release marketing materials, but in 2023 3D ticket sales amassed $1.7 billion, a record for the post-pandemic era. And the number of 3D screens for “Moana 2” speaks to Walt Disney Animation Studios’ continued commitment to the format.
As TheWrap learned on a recent visit to the Burbank, California-based studio, a small band of committed artists and technicians are dedicated to making sure that, if you see “Moana 2” in 3D, you are fully immersed in the oceanic adventure.
The process for making animated films in 3D at Disney differs from other studios — Disney’s 10-person team responsible for overseeing the 3D version works right alongside the core filmmaking team, ensuring that any adjustments are additive instead of distracting or gimmicky.
“Because we keep it comfortable. We want to keep to the original story but we want to enhance the story and make it immersive but comfortable,” Katie Fico, stereoscopic supervisor, told TheWrap. “And the way our tool sets are here, we’re able to keep everything at a consistent depth for your eyes. The characters, you just feel like you’re with them.”
But for Disney, 3D — or “stereo” — is in the studio’s blood.
Storybook Beginnings
Creating a truly 3D image – or at least the illusion of one – has long pre-occupied Disney animators.
The multiplane camera, which pre-dated Disney’s involvement but was most famously utilized by the studio, involved several panes of glass, each with a different layer of the background. When photographing them individually, one shot at a time, it gave the illusion of the camera moving through physical space. The set-up was large and cumbersome; if you ever make it into the Frank G. Wells building on the Disney lot, you can see it in all of its towering glory.
Disney used the process on their influential 1937 short “The Old Mill” before employing it in the first animated feature “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (also released in 1937). “The Old Mill” won the Oscar for best animated short. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” received an honorary Oscar, well, Oscars – one full-sized Oscar and seven smaller Oscars. Shirley Temple gave Disney the awards.
Dimensionality continued to be an obsession for the company, aided by burgeoning computer generated imagery, which allowed for sequences like the opening of 1990’s “The Rescuers Down Under,” the ballroom sequence in 1991’s “Beauty and the Beast” and pretty much all of 1999’s “Tarzan,” which by that point had developed a new system called Deep Canvas, which allowed traditionally animated characters and backgrounds to exist in simulated 3D space.
In the mid-2000s, with an advanced style of 3D becoming popular, Disney was given the opportunity to create entire animated features in 3D. While some might remember things like “Chicken Little” coming out in 3D, the studio also went back and added dimension to traditional animated features, which in many ways felt like the natural conclusion to the multiplane camera experiments of the past. Seeing “Beauty and the Beast” in 3D was akin to looking through a pop-up book version or maybe riding a Disney attraction like it’s a small world or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride – rides that were both “flat” but also dimensional.
The difference between those earlier attempts at stereo 3D and now was that back then, the process was farmed out to visual effects houses like Industrial Light & Magic (which, with Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm, became part of the Magic Kingdom) and Digital Domain.
But now, the stereoscopic conversion is handled in-house, with artists working alongside the filmmakers behind features like “Moana 2.”
A New Horizon
As stereoscopic supervisor, Fico has worked on short films like “Paperman” and “Get a Horse!,” which saw Mickey emerge from a “lost” black-and-white short into fully color computer graphics. She has also supervised work on giant features like “Ralph Breaks the Internet” (which was the first feature the team worked on) and last year’s “Wish.”
“I’ve worked on a bunch in the past, but out of all of them, I feel like this one might be my favorite. And I feel like, when you watch this one, you feel like you’re in it,” Fico explained.
Fico had 10 people on her team, supervising work that was being delivered from both the Burbank studio and the satellite Walt Disney Animation Studio in Vancouver. Fico said that the background of the team was mostly from layout and lighting. “It’s a really unique skill set,” she said. One of the members of the team had just come from DreamWorks where, for a time, a premium had been put on 3D. Two members of her team had been with Disney for more than 30 years. She herself had been at the company for almost 25 years.
Like the other departments, the stereo team goes on research trips – they went to the Wildlife Center for “Zootopia” and the ice exhibit at the Queen Mary for “Frozen II.”
The stereo team is able to control multiple cameras on multiple planes in space, heightening the depth or making it flatter depending on the shot or sequence. “If they want the room to feel small and claustrophobic, we’re able to control that space and how the characters still have volume,” Fico said.
How they’re able to do this is that they are embedded with the rest of the production, starting after layout. They have sessions with the filmmakers who explain how they want the sequence to look and feel, the way the motion is going to work and the like. By the time layout rolls around, they are putting their cameras into the shots. “We do a rough pass to bake in that continuity per shot, it’ll still have animation, but we’ll have continuity,” Fico said. “Then it goes to sweat box [named for the air-condition-less room where they would do shot reviews, now it’s used as shorthand for reviewing animation] and that has final animation. Then we tune up our planes to compensate for the final animation.” They work through effects (sometimes suggesting adding more effects, which you wouldn’t see in the flat version) and lighting as well.
It’s rare in animation to have the 3D team part of almost every step of the process. But that, in Fico’s estimation, is what makes Disney’s 3D more dynamic. They think about how the 3D fits within that specific story, too. With “Wish” they were harkening back to their conversions of traditionally animated movies like “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King,” because of that movie’s specific 2D/3D art style. “We wanted to make it feel like a hybrid, where you’re like, Oh, is it a painting? Is it not a painting, right?” Fico said. “That was fun.”
This reporter saw two sequences from “Moana 2” in 3D – a musical number for a song called “Beyond,” where Moana (voiced again by Auli’i Cravalho) is making her decision to go out on a new adventure; and “Can I Get a Chee Hoo?,” a kind of inspirational anthem sung by Maui (Dwayne Johnson) to Moana. Both showcased a deep level of immersion and emotional clarity. “Can I Get a Chee Hoo?” employs a very specific style, which comes to life in ways that a flat version simply cannot.
“Moana 2,” in 3D, Fico said, is “more emotional.” They were able to push the colors (they’ll actually make them brighter in 3D to compensate for the lower light levels) and emphasize the scale of things, like when Moana and her band of merry travelers come up against a fearsome Kakamora ship. They’re applying everything they have learned from earlier productions to make the most dynamic stereo presentation yet.
As for why 3D is receiving a continued push, Walt Disney Animation Studios chief creative officer (and co-writer of “Moana 2”) Jared Bush explained: “Something that Disney Animation does better than anyone in the world is bring people into immersive environments. And stereo is the best way to do that, to bring audiences into this world with characters that they love.”
