Triple Feature

One week after 20th Century Fox made its much-watched entry into theatrical animation with “Anastasia,” a new company is entering the field long dominated by Walt Disney Co. It’s not Warner Bros. or DreamWorks SKG, though they have big animated pictures in the works. It’s Imax Corp., the Ontario, Canada-based company that owns and programs 150 giant screens worldwide.

The folks at Disney aren’t likely to be threatened by Imax’s animated short that screens before “The Nutcracker” on a dozen Imax screens (including in Irvine and Ontario, Calif.) starting today. The two-minute “Paint Misbehavin’ ” is plotless, and its computer-animated characters are crudely rendered.

But it does have something that Disney doesn’t: It’s in stereoscopic 3-D. Imax executives hope the technique, which creates surprisingly realistic 3-D effects most people have never seen with animation, will prove compelling enough to attract major studios to partner with Imax on bigger, better projects.

Imax has been in the big-screen theater and big-screen movie business for 30 years. Under new management for the last four years, the company is pushing away from documentary-type features and institutional settings (museums, typically) for its theaters and moving toward mainstream entertainment.

Bradley J. Weschler, Imax co-chief executive, said, “We acquired Imax . . . with the vision of taking a brand that has worked well in the institutional world to the commercial world.”

Imax now has more than 150 screens worldwide (both 3-D and 2-D), a third more than in 1994. It has contracts for nearly half again that number. More than a quarter of its screens are now in commercial settings; Imax’s Ontario and Irvine locations are part of Edwards Cinema complexes.

In live-action pictures, Imax has been developing a 3-D “Star Trek” feature with Viacom, which should open next year.

The vogue for location-based entertainment shows no signs of slowing, as theater chains and malls look to draw customers. Imax’s revenue and net earnings have more than doubled since Weschler and his co-chief executive, Richard L. Gelfond, took over.

Weschler and Gelfond say big- screen, 3-D animation could give studios looking to rival Disney animation a competitive edge. A studio could release an abbreviated, 3-D version of an animated feature simultaneously with its regular theatrical debut (Imax features generally run less than an hour), or create a sequel to a computer-animated hit like “Toy Story” for the Imax screen.

The economic model will remain for some time, even though Imax says its 3-D screens, on average, attract seven times the audience of traditional screens. Imax currently has only 20 3-D screens in the U.S. Movies in wide release often open on a hundred times that number of screens.

“We can provide a very different experience,” said Weschler, in an interview from his New York office. “We have the only 3-D distribution system in the world. The thought of 3-D animated characters coming out and being among families, and especially children, will be very powerful [to animation producers].”

Imax estimates it can transform a computer-generated feature like the Disney-Pixar “Toy Story” into a 3-D feature for roughly $6 million. A from-scratch Imax feature would likely cost at least twice that.

By comparison, theatrical animated features cost about $50 million today.

Even at a relatively modest cost, Imax executives admit that an Imax picture takes a long time to reach profitability, but such pictures tend to play for months or even years, rather than weeks.

Weschler says Imax is exploring a number of production models, from the studio paying all production costs to Imax absorbing some costs in exchange for a cut of profits.

Imax co-founder Roman Kroitor led the development of technology to create 3-D animation, which is proprietary to Imax and is done mainly at its studio in Montreal. The process is PC-based and allows an animator to “see” his creations in 3-D via a headset while he “draws” in space in front of him. In theaters, viewers must also wear a headset to see images in 3-D.

According to “Toy Story” producer Ralph Guggenheim, the filmmakers would have liked to have made the film in 3-D, “but that was biting off more than we could chew right then,” he says. Imax has already contracted with Buzz Potamkin and Alvin Cooperman, two experienced animation producers, to create an original 3-D animated feature that could be released by the end of next year. Says former Hanna-Barbera producer Potamkin, “This system is the sort of Holy Grail for animators. It allows the artist to be hands-on from the creation through the final project.”