'Pan' Uses 3D to Enhance 'Hyper-Real' Neverland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0WRwp5Y0Es
Kids don’t grow old, pirates plunder by air and a flying boy is a hero. Logic and the laws of gravity in Disney’s “Pan” don’t bind the world of Neverland, so the creative geniuses behind the film didn’t even have to bend the rules of reality—they re-invented them.
“What we tried to do with ‘Pan’ is create an incredibly immersive world,” director Joe Wright reveals in a featurette released Tuesday. Describing his reincarnation of Disney’s 1953 animated adventure as a “kaleidoscopic journey,” he adds, “with 3D we can make that happen.”
“The sets we built were specifically designed to give that visceral and emotional experience, and I wanted to create a world where space seemed to be constantly shifting,” Wright continues. “So I wanted to create a hyper-real world.”
The live-action, very grim feature stars youngster Levi Miller in the titular role–as the flying boy who leads an uprising against Hugh Jackman’s pirate Blackbeard.
“Pan’s” special effects gurus exhausted nearly every opportunity to take viewers on a spectacular and surreal journey, where sword fights take place on soaring pirate ships that spin upside-down—seemingly in slow motion—and colossal crocodiles can ferociously leap for the kill, yet execute the move as gracefully as an Olympic diver.
“Pan is set in an amazing world," stereographer Chris Parks says. “There’s no reality that we have to hold onto.”
Garrett Hedlund, who plays a young Hook, adds that "Pan" has “so many spectacles” that it tells the story in a way like former iterations could not. “There’s a lot of wonderful things that you’ve never seen before.”
And with so many splashy 3D moments, it would seem difficult to choose which one is most impressive of all. But the eponymous star Miller thinks he knows which scene might have viewers hooked.
Beaming with gusto, he says, “The trampoline fight—that’s going to be magnificent in 3D.”
“Pan” hits theaters on Oct. 9.
