On my first real day here, we decided to hunt down a Real D, 3 D, extra D with more D cinema to see Coraline 3D before it went out of cinemas.

Luckily this being the land of everything there is an IMAX just down the road with a 3D normal cinema screen too. $7 a ticket, bargain. And comes with a free pair of AWESOME SHADES, that you can keep (Terms and conditions apply. 3D Glasses do not work as sunglasses, you will go blind). Here’s me modeling them - they look awesome, me… not so much:

The film was great, and the 3D works really well. Much better than any I’ve seen before. Given the trailers before it, it seems like every new CG film will be coming out in 3D now.

I wondered how well Selick and Co. would pull off Coraline, since I’m a huge fan of the book. It’s imaginative, creepy and cool and the animation looks close to CG most of the time (this is a good thing). I wouldn’t say it quite reaches the scary heights of the book, but for a kid’s film it’s nice to see they’ve kept in most of it.

After the credits there is a tiny 20 second clip which shows how they do one of the animations at the start. It just makes it clear how tedious a process it must be to get even a few seconds of footage done. Must be a great feeling of accomplishment at the end though.