Thirteen years after it first debuted in theaters Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas is back with a vengeance. And by vengeance we mean a stereoscopic 3D version crafted by those trickers and treaters at Industrial Light & Magic and produced by Disney veterran Don Hahn (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast). The perennial stop-motion holiday favorite leaps off of 168 screens across North America today.
Produced by Tim Burton and directed by Henry Selick (James and the Giant Peach, Monkeybone), The Nightmare Before Christmas tells the tale of Jack Skellington, a hero in Halloween Town who decides one year that he would like to play Santa Claus for a change. When the plan goes horribly wrong, Jack and love interest Sally must save Christmas by rescuing the real Santa from the clutches of the evil Oogie Boogie.
Both Burton and Selick were peripherally involved with the process of re-mastering the film in 3D. With computer-generated features such as Diney’s Chicken Little, what they do is move the virtual camera over about an inch to provide the right-eye perspective and give the film depth of field. And while Nightmare employed 3D animation models, it was shot on standard 35mm film. To create the 3D effect, ILM had to build blank CG models of every character in the film. When the original film was projected onto those models, it wrapped around them like a texture map and allowed to artists to do a virtual camera shift.
Selick tells us he has always wished they had shot Nightmare in 3D in the first place because 2D never quite captured the feeling of being on those magnificent sets with those beautiful puppets. He’s currently in pre-production on his next feature, LAIKA’s stop-motion adaptation of the Neil Gaiman book Coraline. Selick plans to shoot it in 3D and is experimenting with a motion-control rig that automatically shifts the camera slightly to the right every other frame to capture the right-eye perspective.
Nightmare earned around $50 million domestically with its initial release but has grown in popularity over the years. Disney would not comment on how expensive the 3D conversion process was, but it was certainly not cheap. The fact that the studio invested so much into the revival suggests that it’s hoping the film will be something it can bring out every year like Warner Bros.’ IMAX 3-D version of The Polar Express, which has grossed more than $60 million at IMAX venues alone and will return to screens again this holiday season.
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