Updated 4/17/10

Blanket disclaimer: I am aware that corners are cut routinely on motion picture productions, and that resulting errors in continutity, however glaring, are unavoidable and common, and rarely intentional. However, this movie was made by Stanley Kubrick, arguably the most meticulous and painstaking director ever, whose obsessive-compulsive tendencies were encourged and well-funded to a legendary degree. Anyway, let's take a look at the maze (Kubrick's replacement for the magical hedge animals in the book). "This is our famous hedge maze," Ullman tells Jack and Wendy Torrance (below). Ullman says that the walls are sixteen feet high, and that he wouldn't go in there unless he "had an hour to spend to get out."

The map (below) shows the basic layout of the maze. Note that the arched entry gate (above right) is visible on the map, in the center of the right (short) edge of the diagram (arguably, the map is rotated 90 degrees from the way it should be oriented, given its position along the short edge of the maze). The map's version of the maze is visibly larger, with three "bays" between the center archway and each corner, rather than the mere two "bays" along the corresponding portion of the full-size hedge wall (above). Despite this, the full-size maze exterior essentially matches up to the map...

...and to the model (inside the Hotel's reception room), which, in turn, matches the map almost exactly (despite what some on the Internet have said). Note eight posts along the short sides of the maze, and ten along its longer edges. Note the entrance archway directly in front of Nicholson.

Here are two views of the "long side" of the maze (two images below). That receding hedge wall on the right side of these frames is one entire (long) edge of the maze. Look at Wendy and Danny, standing right next to the side of the maze, and notice its size compared to them. (You can count the ten posts along the edge, matching the map and the model.) Viewed from outside, the maze just isn't that big.

But inside...

Above, start and end frames of a slow zoom, which reveals Wendy at the maze's center (bottom image). (Danny's obscured by the topiary.) The last two lines in the scene are Wendy asking "You didn't think it was going to be this big, did you?" (and Danny saying, "No.") I can't blame them for reacting this way; that's a big maze, like a city block. Someone's written an eyewitness account of interviewing and/or meeting Kubrick in 1979, while he was in production on The Shining, and actually watching Kubrick set up the zoom shot (above, bottom two images), which was an optical trick shot that took hours to prepare. Kubrick, not somebody else. So the maze's hallucenogenic changing scale is deliberate (or, as "deliberate" as anything in Kubrick). There are two elements comprising the trick zoom shot, above. The "aerial" footage is masked to show the innermost, central chamber of the maze. If you look closely, you can see the slight difference in color and brightness that gives it away. The rest of the image is a miniature, with a rear-projection or front-projection optical insert integrated directly into the miniature or into a high-resolution photograph of the miniature (I can't remember which from the account I read). But Kubrick spent hours aligning the composition so that the z-axis perspective of the miniature matches the plate, so that all the shadows match, and even the color temperature and the luminosity is close enough that you have to be shown where the seam is. The outdoor set of the maze interior (which Wendy and Danny explore, filmed by Garrett Brown's ground-level steadicam) is not the same as the indoor maze set, used for the final chase sequence:

Vivian Kubrick's documentary about the making of The Shining shows Kubrick filming the later, nighttime/snowbound maze sequences, which involve very fast steadicam tracking shots through the paths in the maze. Above, Kubrick's production manager holds a diagram of the interior, smoke-filled maze set (Danny Lloyd is looking on in the foreground). Below, the same image, distorted to show the actual Maze set plan: