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Product type Motion picture exhibition Owner The Walt Disney Company Introduced June 23, 2005; 11 years ago (June 23, 2005) | ||
Disney Digital 3-D is a brand name used by The Walt Disney Company to describe three-dimensional films made and released by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures mostly under the Walt Disney Pictures label and shown exclusively using digital projection.
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Disney Digital 3-D in itself is not a presentation or a production format or technology, but rather a purely marketing concept. Films advertised as Disney Digital 3-D come from a number of sources, film, digital camera as well as animation software, and can be presented using any digital 3D technology, including RealD, Dolby 3D, XpanD 3D and MasterImage 3D. There is no specific handling involved.
Pre-2005 Disney 3-D films
Disney had previously released two 3-D animated shorts in 1953, Adventures in Music: Melody, the first American 3-D animated short, and Working for Peanuts, starring Donald Duck and Chip 'n' Dale.
Disney also produced 3-D films for its theme parks, including Disneyland's 3D Jamboree (1956), featuring the Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeers and including Melody and Working for Peanuts; Magic Journeys (1982), Captain EO (1986), Muppet*Vision 3D (1991), Honey, I Shrunk the Audience (1994), It's Tough to Be a Bug! (1998), the film portion of Tokyo DisneySea's Magic Lamp Theater, and Mickey's Philharmagic (2003).
Between 2003 and 2005, Dimension Films (then-owned by The Weinstein Company) had made a couple of 3-D films. Two of them were Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl.
Post-2005 Disney 3-D films
The first Disney Digital 3D film was Chicken Little, which was released in late 2005. For the release, Disney collaborated with RealD to install RealD's 3D digital projection system featuring Christie CP2000 2K DLP projectors along with silver screens for 84 screens in US theaters.
The computer-animated film Chicken Little was followed by a re-release of The Nightmare Before Christmas on October 20, 2006. Nightmare, a 1993 stop motion movie, was originally shot in 2D on 35mm-film with the 3D version generated by Industrial Light and Magic from this source using computer technology.
In 2007, Disney re-released the film Working for Peanuts with the theatrical release of the 3D version of Meet the Robinsons.
The first live-action Disney Digital 3-D release was Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert, which followed in 2008. In 2009, G-Force became the first film in Disney Digital 3-D from producer Jerry Bruckheimer.
On May 29, 2009, Disney released Pixar's Up, the first Pixar film to be presented in 3D. This film was then followed by a 3D double feature re-release of Toy Story and Toy Story 2 on October 2, 2009, although neither of these films' animation was altered. Subsequent Pixar films, such as Toy Story 3 and Cars 2, were also released in Disney Digital 3D.
Two of Disney's traditionally animated films were reissued with 3D conversions in 2011, The Lion King – released on August 26 internationally and on September 16 in North America - and Beauty and the Beast – limited to 13-day run in September at the El Capitan Theater in Los Angeles for North America, as well as short runs in New Zealand, Japan, Australia, India and Spain in 2010. These re-releases were being supervised by Don Hahn, who produced both films. Beauty and the Beast in 3D received a wider release in January 13, 2012. Two more films were reissued in 3D in 2012, Finding Nemo in September 14, 2012 and Monsters, Inc. in December 19, 2012. The Little Mermaid was going to be re-released in 3D September 13, 2013 but this one was cancelled due to the under-performances of the other Disney 3D re-releases.
Disney has released films from Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm in the 3D format, beginning with The Avengers (2012) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), respectively. However, the 3D format was not branded as "Disney".