Disney’s Films Used to Look Different

Welcome! It’s a new Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and our plan goes like this:

• 1. About digital images on analog film.
• 2. Animation newsbits.
• 3. The last word.

Now, let’s go!

1. Compromising

There was a time when computer animation wasn’t distributed on computers.

Today, physical reels of film are a little rare in theaters. It caused trouble for The Odyssey this summer: only 41 venues in the world were equipped to screen 70 mm film stock. Most theaters work with digital files. Most filmmakers do, too.

But that wasn’t always the case. In 2004, when The Incredibles debuted in both physical and digital editions, the latter was newsworthy. The New York Times noted that “only a handful of cinemas” were set up for the digital version; an expert estimated that just “154 sites worldwide” could project it.

“We’re still looking for that breakthrough, for the installation of thousands of screens,” said Bill Kinder of Pixar. The studio animated digitally, but, from the beginning, it’d been a hybrid operation out of necessity. The team’s “pixels needed to merge with that world-standard distribution freeway, 35 mm film,” wrote Kinder and Bobbie O’Steen.

Converting images from computer screens to film stock wasn’t a simple thing, though. It was always a bit tricky — especially in the color and light.

Monitors and physical film are wholly different mediums. At Studio Ghibli, Michiyo Yasuda encountered this reality in the ‘90s, when the team switched to digital paint. She was the color specialist, and she knew how real paint looked on film. But things had changed. As she said about My Neighbors the Yamadas:

… because the images we made [on computers] had very light colors, when we tried them on film stock, it couldn’t pick them all up. In other words, the color didn’t appear at first, and it took a long time just to reach this present form. Even from the colors of the very first “zero” [screening of the film for the staff], there were considerable revisions. … When color was applied directly to cel, I could hold it in my hands, look at it and think, “This is fine. If this works well, it’s all right to film.” That’s what I’ve relied on, but, this time, I couldn’t see the actual result, you might say.

Through trial and error and a lot of pain, Yasuda got final images that worked. It was a battle that Pixar knew well.

During the ‘80s, most teams used CRT screens to put computer graphics on film. Scenes were exposed, one frame at a time, onto the reels. But the color output of CRTs in that era bothered Pixar’s David DiFrancesco — it was too blue, he said. He wanted to “get the full range of color that film is capable of.”

For years, DiFrancesco tested and invented techniques. Pixar’s early shorts were printed with lasers. “[W]e have determined which lasers and which wave lengths best match up with the most commonly used motion picture materials, namely [Eastmancolor] 5247 and 5243 film,” he said in 1986.

Still, color was never straightforward. Pixar’s Darwyn Peachey noted that it took time for artists to learn “the relationship between film and [digital] video” and to “correct for the differences, and get the best contrasts and color range possible in the final transfer.” Even then, it required “a fair amount of fine tuning.”

The job of color-checking Tin Toy (1988) fell to technician Don Conway. At the time, a Pixar production manager explained:

We start by assuming that every time we double the brightness of a pixel we will get double the response on film. It’s a false assumption, but it’s a starting point. It doesn’t quite work that way because film responds nonlinearly to light, so you get a strange permutation in reality. But you do get a different response on the film to every color. So we carefully distort the color range of each color so that it matches the response curve for the film we are using. … Don shoots wedges once a week, all through production, so that when we get everything to the lab, we have very little color timing to do.

In the ‘90s, Ralph Eggleston joined Pixar. He was pretty new to computer stuff when he began designing the look of Toy Story — a project recorded on film stock with customized Solitaire Cine II machines, as we wrote last year. Soon enough, though, he had rules of thumb for the gap between digital colors and final output.

“We had to learn early on. Greens go dark really fast, while the reds stay pretty true,” he said. “Blues have to be less saturated, to look fully saturated on film, while the oranges look really bad on computer screens, but look really great on film.”

Pixar was key to the mainstreaming of computer animation. That didn’t start with Toy Story.

In the ‘80s, Disney had hired Pixar to create CAPS, the infrastructure beneath the Disney renaissance. “The Rescuers Down Under [1990] was the first movie ever to be entirely digitally produced,” said a Disney exec.

For a CAPS feature, every shot was painted and composited on computers. Like with Toy Story and its Cine II units, the final images were recorded from CRTs onto film stock. Here’s producer Don Hahn:

The scene is photographed one frame at a time off of a cathode-ray tube onto 35 millimeter motion picture film. The film is processed, color balanced and given to the editor to cut into the story reel.

And Disney, like everyone else, worked around the problem of color and light.

Hahn mentioned that “you have to compromise when you go to film.” Talking about Beauty and the Beast (1991), an early CAPS success, he remembered a tunic that “came out rusty colored” when the team had initially hoped for an “apple red.” Computers were one thing, film another. Yet these movies were meant to screen in theaters, and so the only option was to keep film in mind.

Seen on their own, CAPS images could feel sort of naked. Some colors were coldly digital, and the gradients stood out, and there wasn’t much texture. Those weren’t the images in theaters, though. During the transfer to 35 mm film, and the final corrections, the look changed.

In the case of Mulan, the colors quieted and came to resemble Hans Bacher’s concept art, inspired by traditional Chinese painting. With Hercules, the contrasts deepened and the sharp, white highlights dissolved into spots of soft light. The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s light effects are gorgeous on film, too, and sometimes look like they were achieved with multiple-exposure tricks in-camera.

Today, most Disney renaissance films aren’t really available in their original theatrical forms. It became possible to release digital CAPS data without physical film as an intermediary, and new versions of these movies appeared. Hahn loved the results. “[Y]ou get this pristine image that looks exactly as it looked when we were sitting at these CAPS monitors seeing the movie and making it,” he said.

Those images on their monitors weren’t all the way finished, though. There was one more layer of artistry to apply.

Some of the renaissance films — including Hercules, Mulan and Hunchback — had early DVD releases based on their 35 mm versions. When you compare them to the digital releases we have now, the differences are interesting.

At one time, the grit of real film wasn’t strictly a positive thing.

These all-digital releases happened for a reason. Don Hahn complained that Disney’s movies became “a little muddy and scratchy” on 35 mm. When Hunchback first hit DVD and had visible grain, one reviewer wasn’t pleased:

Unlike other recent animated movies from the Mouse that arrived on DVD via a digital-to-digital transfer, Hunchback’s transfer was struck from film. That, combined with a low bitrate for the video … hurts what is easily one of the most beautiful films in Disney’s vault. … There is also quite a bit of film grain present, and again it could have easily been avoided.

A few years earlier, A Bug’s Life had become the first digital-to-digital DVD release. John Lasseter spoke similarly to Hahn. “The audiences at home are going to see what we saw in our computer monitor. It’s crisp and beautiful. It is a real pure version of our movie straight from our computers,” he said.

In the newly digital age, bypassing film looked slick. Disney used raw CAPS stills to market Mulan, for example, and filled the movie’s art book with them.

The company was within its rights to treat its projects that way. There’s no single version of the Disney renaissance films or A Bug’s Life or Toy Story: any home release or 35 mm print will have its own differences, introduce its own changes.

That said, it’s just true that this work — in its colors, light, contrasts — was planned to be recorded on 35 mm film. The process was a highly developed craft, often overlooked. These may have been computer-based movies, but everything was tailored to the final analog image.

Even before the digital changeover, the final image had always been the thing in animation. Just as Ghibli worked toward the filmed result in Yamadas, it’d done the same in the cel era. And it aims to preserve that look in its modern restorations of its pre-digital films. Like the studio’s Atsushi Okui told Cartoon Brew this year:

… the end result that we as audience members see is different from the coloring of the cel art itself, because it’s on film — we see the color that is filtered through the film. What we aimed to do was not to make the cel art as vivid as possible color-wise, but to recreate what the audience saw when they originally saw it on film.

One day, the big American companies might follow this logic with their old hybrid movies. After all: pure, clean images aren’t as irresistible as they once were. And the filter of film in this older work, once seen as dirt to clean up, feels a bit more like a layer of paint that was scrubbed away by mistake.

1. Newsbits

• We lost Edit Bleier (87), a veteran filmmaker and educator in Hungarian animation.
• There’s a trailer out for the American documentary Animation Mavericks: The Forgotten Story of UPA, due next year.
• On that note, an American exhibit called 20 Great Waves uses animation to cover surfing, and you can find its UPA-inspired trailer here.
• The Russian animator Leonid Shmelkov (Restlessness) posted an English clip of Shape of Your Heart, a TV series he’s developing.
• Check out the trailer for All We Have, a film produced in Australia (and many other countries) by members of the Palestinian diaspora.
• In Nigeria, the studio Smids hosted a group of young students and walked them through the animation process.
• Also in Nigeria, Toei Animation is partnering with CR Motion+ to produce a short film.
• New data shows that France’s animation exports dropped by 30% last year.
• In America, Coyote vs. Acme has earned almost $48 million, bringing its worldwide total to roughly $65 million.
• On Monday, Cartoon Forum starts in France. This year, 66 shows and specials are vying for funding and other support. For more, see Cineuropa.
• With over $90 million at the domestic box office, Chiikawa the Movie is Japan’s biggest film of the year so far.
• Finally, we wrote about Little Mole, one of the most famous cartoon series from Eastern Europe.

3. Last word

That’s a wrap for today! As usual, we’re closing out this issue with personal comments from the two of us:

John: Today’s lead story is one we’ve planned for a while. Last year, we did a piece about Toy Story and 35 mm film that got quite a bit of traction, but I realized there was more to say about this in-between era when digital animation screened in analog venues. I’m glad we could revisit the topic. Among other things, it increasingly stands out to me that the artists used bright light to create effects back then, and that, in some of these projects, an obvious CRT glow was scattered in the emulsion. It’s fascinating to spot those tiny details in the versions of these films I remember from the ‘90s.

Jules: I’ve been reading a number of classic novels this past year, and I’ve been surprised by how different the original stories and characters often are from their popular perceptions — many of which actually come from later adaptations. Frankenstein is a young, ambitious student, not an old mad scientist, and he has no Igor and no lightning machine. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mina is so central to the story you could almost argue she’s the protagonist, and she’s definitely not just a victim of Dracula on the sidelines. And, most recently, I’ve discovered that Phantom of the Opera actually has a lot of humor in it! It’s been interesting to learn that these cultural touchstones are ultimately the product of many different people across time; and to learn how fresh the original stories still are.

Until next time!

See The New York Times.

The second quote comes from the book Making the Cut at Pixar.

From Yasuda’s interview in My Neighbors the Yamadas Roman Album.

From CineFex (May 1986), also the source of DiFrancesco’s next quote.

See Cinefantastique (November 1995), used multiple times.

From American Cinematographer (November 1989).

Eggleston mentioned his lack of computer knowledge in Animation Magazine (December 1995).

See Disney’s Treasury of Children’s Classics.

From Hahn’s book Animation Magic.

See AWN’s interview with Hahn, used multiple times.

From IGN’s review.

See the Los Angeles Times.