The three-dimensional cinema was not as new as the marketing departments wanted us to believe. An old visual trick of cinema revitalized by a technological legion, the 3D effect practically rescued cinema from its own laziness, but the truth is that the experts of yesteryear also had their aces up their sleeves. Of course, one of them was Walt Disney and his formidable team. The “multiplane camera” was one of the most impressive creations of cinema and animation, and although the effect achieved was not purely stereoscopic, its results are still remembered and celebrated.
The fact that almost every new Hollywood super production comes out in its “3D” version never represented a technological advance, but rather a kind of “marketing desperation” to attract people to cinemas without adding much creativity to the equation. When 3D was "reintroduced" to the big screen, people's consumption habits were altered, but it could hardly be said that it had anything new.
How Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera Works
The idea of conveying something beyond the two dimensions has existed for many years. The most important works explored this false sense of depth, especially in animation, which at that time was completely artisanal.
Each frame was dedicated work, the skill of the draftsmen was tested in every stroke and every brushstroke, and the combined effect was excellent... but they wanted more.
As Walt Disney explains in the video, once the “action” in the frames was finished, the two dimensions of the background hit the observer.
Any zoom effect on a point of the scene drastically altered the size of the objects, becoming something completely unreal. The way to combat this was developed through the “MultiPlane Camera”.
The first camera of this type was invented in 1933 by Ub Iwerks, a renowned animator and cartoonist who worked for Walt Disney. However, the design we can see in the video was developed by William Garity in 1937, also for the Walt Disney Studios.
Basically, the multiplane camera divides a scene into four “layers” or "planes", based on oil paintings on glass.
The camera, focusing from a vertical position, allows the operators to alter the speed, direction of travel, and zoom factor of each of these planes, thus generating a much more elaborate illusion of depth and three-dimensionality.
The more “distant” objects were placed in the final layer, almost without registering movement and “keeping the distance”, while the “closer” ones moved at a much greater speed.
The short known as “The Old Mill” from 1937 served as a proof of concept for the multiplane camera, and later it was used extensively in classics such as Bambi and Fantasia, among others.
The last Disney film relatively “modern” to use the multiplane camera was The Little Mermaid from 1989, but in that film the original cameras were no longer used.
Now, digitalization and computer animations can imitate and expand this effect very easily, but it seems cold compared to the artisanal nature of working with a multiplane camera.
Each layer had to be treated with extreme care, since it worked with glass, and a mistake could not only cost entire hours of drawing and painting, but also cause a serious accident. In the video, Walt Disney calls it “a trick”, but it remains one of the most important points in the history of animation.
