The Lion King 3D *****/*

The Lion King was one of the first films I saw at the cinema.  I loved it then, and I still love it now.  The Lion King 3D was to be the first 3D film I saw at the cinema.  I thought this lent the experience a pleasing unity (only if it had been Hook, my actual first film at the cinema, could it have been more perfect).  I hadn't really heard anything positive about 3D, which is why I hadn't been before, but you can't write something off without trying it first, can you?

So, along I skipped to the cinema.  I got my 3D glasses.  The oracle of the internet, yahoo!answers, had told me that it was fine to wear them over normal glasses.  This was not true - I had to hold them on so they didn't fall off my nose - but I could cope with that for the sake of an exciting enhanced Lion King experience.

But I did not get an exciting enhanced Lion King experience.  As the film opened on the scenes of the Serenghetti, accompanied by the glorious strains of Circle of Life, as the small children around me gasped with delight, I could only look around in confusion, peer over my multiple glasses to see the blurry screen, and realise with crushing disappointment that I am one of the 2-12% of the population who can't see 3D.

Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote:

If the golden-crested wren
Were a nightingale---why, then,
Something seen and heard of men
Might be half as sweet as when
Laughs a child of seven. 


Well Algernon that is all well and good, but when the child of seven is laughing and you can't see what they're pleased about it's not sweet.  It's just depressing, to be honest.  Stupid children.

I had to keep the ridiculous glasses on because otherwise I was just watching a blurry screen half the time.  So basically I watching a film in the dark whilst wearing sunglasses.  Only for a film as wonderful as The Lion King could I have stayed for the whole thing.

So I don't think I'll be going to see any more 3D films.  And I'll just have to hope that 3D isn't the future, and that it instead goes the way of those magic eye pictures that were so popular in the 90s that I couldn't see either.  What do you mean, look through the image?  Stupid magic eye seers.

I still love The Lion King though, and it was rather special to see it on the big screen again.  And yes I did still cry when Mufasa's big liony face appeared in the sky, even though his nose wasn't sticking out at me and I had too many pairs of glasses on.  Hakuna matata.