By Katey Rich
Tim Burton is on a roll lately, with The Nightmare Before Christmas raking it in as a 3D re-release and Sweeney Todd getting some critics to jump out of their seats in anticipation. Burton's films have always popped off the screen in regular old 2D, and even when some of his projects fail on a storytelling level, the visuals always knock 'em dead. Apparently Beowulf is proof that, when you've got the 3D format, the visuals matter way more anyway. There's scarcely anyone working today with a better visual imagination than Burton, and given that he's a sure-handed storyteller as well, his 3D projects have the opportunity to one-up Beowulf as spectacle with heart.
Most exciting about these projects is how different they are. Alice sounds like an entirely new realm for Burton, taking on a world as similarly wacky as his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but without limits. You can imagine that his characters will be just far enough from actual human beings that no one will even notice the "waxwork" effect some have complained of in Beowulf. Frankenweenie seems likely to be a much more traditional Burton project, but given Nightmare's huge success in 3D it's clear that Burton will know how to harness the 3D to serve the stop-motion.
It's not clear yet whether the future is 3D performance-capture animation (someone probably said that about Smell-O-Vision back in the day, and look where we are now), but as long as it's the cutting edge it makes perfect sense for Tim Burton to be among those exploring it. Robert Zemeckis has done an excellent job leading the charge for this new filmmaking technique, but with a true visionary like Burton aboard, there's no telling how far this can go, or how beautiful it can be.
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