character - background relation: monochrome color schemes

Many contemporary live-action films work within fairly limited color palettes. Often, whole shots are tinted in a particular hue or display very muted palettes. They help to convey a certain mood in broad strokes. In the context of The Princess and the Frog (Musker/Clements, 2009) which I'll discuss later, let's have a look at an easy way of evoking warmth and nostalgia.

Good color schemes are always limited to a few carefully chosen dominating hues, many times two or three, sometimes only one. If you try to photograph a real environment, there are most certainly too many hues in the picture to fit a predetermined color scheme. In painting, one way of relating all the colors of a palette to each other is mixing one color into all the others, so only one hue will appear pure and all the others are less brilliant but brought into closer harmony.

Rembrandt van Rijn (selfportrait, 1660)

Pablo Picasso (selfportrait, 1901)

So in live-action films, unless you choose to incorporate only local colors that are consistent with a narrow color scheme, this same effect is usually achieved by colored lights, filters or color timing. Such schemes that are strongly dominated by one single hue mostly depend on the contrast of value. I’ll call them “monochrome” which is not technically accurate but serves the purpose here.

Monochrome schemes have been carefully avoided in mainstream color cinema until the French Nouvelle Vague of the early 60s, but are quite common nowadays in live-action films because accurate skin tones aren't the benchmark any more.

Sometimes contrast on a larger scale is evoked by placing differently tinted monochrome shots next to each other. This was standard practice in the silent era where night scenes were usually toned or tinted (depending on the dying process) blue and daylight was a warm yellow. 

This scene from Chris Columbus’ first Harry Potter (2001) movie uses approximately the same very limited palettes (they are almost exactly complimentary, if you invert the picture in photoshop) but rather for mood than to indicate daytime.

Let’s focus on the yellow scheme: the sepia tone is usually associated with vintage photographs and has been overused for flashbacks and memories. It instantly evokes nostalgia and warmth. In fact, Columbus uses it to make us forget that this movie takes place in our very own time, so the prep uniforms don’t seem too conservative. And besides we’re supposed to believe that this castle is lit by candles and ancient magic.

Slightly awkward...

These screenshots from the French cult classic Delicatessen (Jeunet/Caro, 1991) show yellow as a very different color: Almost everybody looks sick. After all, the story deals with cannibalism. Sometimes the yellow tends to dingy brown, sometimes to olive, but the whole film is deeply drenched in sickly yellow.

 

(this palette corresponds to the right image above)

Here we have two images from an early scene of Les Triplettes de Belleville (Chomet, 2003), a movie that is heavily influenced by French graphic novels (especially the background style of Nicolas de Crécy).

(corresponds to the left image above)

Here the yellow is not only indicating autumn, very different from, say, in Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry (1955), but it also strongly unifies complimentary colors red (the bike) and green (the sweater). Such palettes have been derogatorily called “pee and poo colors” because the colors aren't balanced by natural grays and white.

...but also warm and golden
More typical is the use of “golden” light for romantic scenes. It instantly reminds the viewer of early morning as well as magic hour daylight which makes everything look warm and glowing. 

This scene from The English Patient (Minghella, 1996) is not only an early morning love scene but also a flashback. In the context of the movie both lovers are connected to desert sand which displays the same range of colors.

This monochrome color palette of the image on the right shows the slight differences between background and characters (left half vs right half). The characters look definitely warmer. Yellow/orange palettes have the advantage that skin tones aren't too far from reality (compared to blue or green).

This resulting saturation of all the warm colors in the picture appeals to most people and therefore is heavily used in advertising photography. There is a certain gravitas, a sense of lavishness to it. It’s no coincidence that an orange glow is often associated with magic and gold as in “golden hour” or “magic hour”.

Note: PAL/Secam and NTSC have different color profiles, yet both look considerably warmer than the standard RGB that .JPG uses. Especially yellow may look closer to orange on a TV screen than in these screengrabs.

Inbetween IX

Last week I had to design a flyer for a small concert I'm co-organizing.

Initially I wanted to have a simple photograph of the performer, singer/songwriter Elritschi (lead singer of Jolly and the Flytrap), but there aren't too many good photos that haven't already been used for years, so I decided to copy his pose from the following concert picture.

I then played around with a few color combinations focusing on his face...

 

 ...but then we opted for the following more eye-catching color:

"The Audience Contract" by Roland Zag

“Sometimes you want to upset an audience so you can change them. I’ve done so-called Hollywood films, and I know that it’s all about wanting the audience to feel upbeat, give them a happy ending. But they also like complete stories. If your story’s complete it doesn’t have to be a happy ending.”

Morgan Freeman

We can always tell whether a film moved us or left us cold, but we can hardly explain why exactly this was the case. A German book about emotional screenwriting proposes a detailed framework to describe universally (for western audiences, that is) comprehensible emotions in stories. It is based on analyses of a wide array of successful films, not just Hollywood blockbusters with happy endings.
Should the book ever become available in English, the animation industry would certainly benefit from it.

Analysing the emotional impact of movies has always been of great interest to me. I even did my master thesis on David Lynch’s sound design (after being told that analysing color schemes of animated features was not a workable concept). But all those tools we usually associate with creating emotions in a movie – music, color, sound design, even acting – are merely artistic devices to emphasize emotions that are already in the screenplay. Sometimes they do work on their own, but that’s not what I’m after here.

Whenever there is a discussion about recent animated features, the term “heart” is used excessively. But people hardly ever manage to explain what they mean by “heart” or “emotional maturity” other than admitting that they fought tears during projection. So the basic question is: what conditions have to be fulfilled within a story to be able to cause emotional response from an audience?

German script doctors Roland Zag and Norbert Maass have been researching that topic under the premise that in order to be successful beyond the first weekend (which heavily depends on marketing budgets) a film has to generate word of mouth recommendation. In order to do so, it has to be emotionally accessible to people with different personal experiences.

In his book “Der Publikumsvertrag” (“the audience contract”), Roland Zag presents us with guidelines for emotional screenwriting based on what he calls “the human factor”. I’m usually very skeptical of these kinds of manuals because many of them try to sell you the secret of success based on very narrow normative assumptions by their authors. However, this one is not concerned with formal story structure (like plot points or three act theories) but with the actual content of stories: characters and their relationships.

Zag explains the subject matter of the “audience contract” as follows: In return for a leap of faith, the audience expects stories whose conflicts, which are more or less difficult to resolve, undergo more or less successful coping strategies. The author then presents detailed categories of interhuman relationships based on the empirical analysis of 200 feature films. Zag is always aware that box office success is no indicator of artistic quality, instead he attempts to explain why films and not only blockbusters are successful.

Some of the most important factors that trigger socially conditional emotions are: affiliation to social groups, commitment and an imbalance in give and take. Of course, emotional plausibility is also an issue, but never taste or artistic concepts. Unfortunately, the book and the accompanying blog where Maass and Zag continue to do market analyses of current films are only available in German. There is a general summary in English on the blog, though.

There are no animated features among those 200 films (a market analysis of Up! can be found on the blog), mainly because the author takes it for granted that animated family films depend almost completely on the human factor. Several examples have shown, though, that its basic rules have been violated which led to less successful films compared to production and marketing costs.

What the book ultimately provides us with is a framework that enables us to talk about the creation of emotional stories in more or less clear categories. They also serve as a set of useful tools to analyze any given movie or screenplay concerning emotional resonance and audience response. Of course, success is also dependent on other factors, but on a large scale, without “the human factor” there is little chance.

A Sense of Wonder - Some Thoughts on "Gake no ue no Ponyo" (Spoiler Alert)

Master film maker Miyazaki Hayao proves the power of hand drawn animation in ways Disney’s upcoming Princess and the Frog never could. Even more so than in his recent epic fantasies he doesn’t care for classical plot construction or superfluous explanations. Instead, Ponyo is truly cinematic in its uncompromised artistic vision and simultaneously the first genuine children’s movie I’ve seen in a long time. In a nice reversal of mainstream formula, what the clueless adult characters consider to be the climactic challenge is so easily overcome by the unprejudiced children’s sincerity that the sudden resolution may come as a surprise.

Nowadays it’s difficult to write about films like Inglourious Basterds, Antichrist or Ponyo because such iconic works immediately spawn innumerable online reviews and commentaries. What’s more, many of these dig much deeper than a classical movie review in print ever could. Veritable secondary literature is therefore spreading like the swine flu and buried among even more recycled superficial articles on the subject. So I can’t probably add anything (except my personal opinion) that hasn’t already been said. Well, I try anyway.

Universally positive reactions
All of these films mentioned above are created by directors many of whose devoted followers are themselves active participants in the blogosphere. So in addition to rave reviews in almost every American newspaper, Ponyo has been discussed in about every conceivable way by animation enthusiasts and professionals. But contrary to many professionals’ more distinguished reactions to the last four Pixar films that often differed heavily from what live-action critics thought about them, Ponyo has been hailed as a masterpiece by almost everyone in the community despite its freewheeling and uneven pacing.

Miyazaki has always emphasized that his movies are first and foremost for Japanese audiences. But because of his underlying themes of ecological devastation, pacifism and devotional love, most of these stories are universally understandable. On the other hand, what is conceived by most Western movie goers as a specifically Japanese element – animism and unexplained magic in everyday life – is probably more characteristic of Miyazaki Hayao’s own personal artistic world view. And it is exactly what makes his movies so seductive.

Balance and shape-shifting
As always, literally everything is animated in the truest sense of the word, i. e. there is a soul in everything (animate = ensoul), be it water, wind or a tree. Humans are just part of this world but not its masters even if at least the adults are oblivious to this fact. Although in my opinon, this is decidedly not an ecological fable, environmental pollution is ever present and metaphorically handled in the unbalancing of nature Ponyo accidentally causes by trying to become human.

The pollution of the Minamata Bay in the 50s and 60s has been cited as one of Miyazaki’s key inspirations ever since the Nausicaä days. (In the original event, the fish in the Minamata Bay have absorbed poisonous mercury and continued to reproduce.) I believe that this is the character defining moment for Ponyo’s father Fujimoto who is still wearing Sixties clothes. It may also explain his deep contempt for his fellow humans. But fortunately, his strange actions and contemplations are hardly explained and activate our imagination far more than most fantasy films well-grounded on painstakingly explained rules. It’s been reported (Michael Sporn, Daniel Thomas McInnes) that the American dub contains additional lines of explanatory dialogue which I’m very skeptical about because I didn’t feel that there was something missing in the subtitled Japanese version I saw.

Like Sophie in Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo is able to transform herself depending on her emotional state. Miyazaki may be one of the last animation directors who believe that a character’s physics should reflect their emotions. What Tytla was able to convey in his unique acting style by animating forces is translated to the possibility of shape-shifting. The balance between characters is also expressed by changing sizes (as is visible in the case of Ponyo’s mother Gran Mamare). Shape-shifting, of course, extends to the waves as well. After Ponyo has provoked the strangely suspended tsunami, underwater life is unbalanced by the advent of scarily calm prehistoric creatures.
 
A Sense of Wonder
Ponyo may not be very focused at first glance but it is certainly true to a child’s perception of the world in every aspect. The adults whose actions and motivations go over their children’s heads have no clue what goes on around them while hurrying through life. Sosuke himself behaves like a real five-year old, something we hardly ever see in animated movies these days. His (and Ponyo’s) animation contains so much human observation and small recognizable gestures that it is a joy to witness even though some of the animation is on 3s (which I will never be able to adjust to on a big screen).

Ponyo herself is even more like a child, in some aspects like a baby (much has already been written about the staring scene with the real baby) who is constantly wondering about the unknown human world. One of Ponyo's greatest merits is doubtlessly its power to activate our own sense of wonder when we discover the environment with Sosuke. Despite the relatively simple designs, the screen is always brimming over with details to discover and Miyazaki is sage enough to give us the time to revel in these discoveries. Joe Hisaishi’s lush score is equally important to create a dreamlike mood. (Probably as a concession to Western tastes the music in the Japanese version is now almost wall to wall unlike in Laputa, for example.)

For once, the worn-out expression that a film “appeals to our inner child” is really appropriate. It isn’t just an excuse to be silly or sentimental (children are less sentimental than adults would like to see them, anyway), it is an adequate description of the power of Miyazaki’s intuitive storytelling that manages to make us accept a world of wonders without wanting to ask mundane questions.

character - background color relation

I apologize for the lack of substantial posts lately. Currently I’m revisiting some subjects I have already started writing about during the last few months but never managed to finish.

I’ve been analyzing films with regard to character relationships and narration, so there will probably follow some posts about this, especially on Pinocchio and Dumbo. But first I’d like to tackle a subject that’s been on my mind for a very long time:

colored lighting in animation

Basically this concerns the character – background color relation and what degree of realism the art direction of a certain film tried to achieve.

I don’t believe in film history as a record of masterpieces because a film doesn’t have to be a masterpiece (or even a decent film, for that matter) to be of historical value. A film can be typical or even influential and still fail as both art and entertainment. If I had to show a typical Italian Western of the late 60s I probably wouldn’t pick any of Sergio Leone’s masterpieces but some cheap B-movie that exhibits all the traits of that particular genre and time. So what I’m trying to say is that most of the films I discuss in this post are not necessarily great ones, I don’t even like some of them, but they represent steps in an evolution of style.

I didn’t really know how to start on that subject until I watched Don Bluth’s Banjo (1979) DVD set half a year ago (Jerry Beck reviews it here, it also sparked a Bluth-re-evaluation debate spread over several blogs).

About eight and a half minutes into the film, the kitten Banjo is looking for shelter on a rainy night. On the commentary track one of the directors states that he thinks the scene should have been darker and they should have painted Banjo bluer because of the blue light everywhere. They then go on about how they achieved a great effect with a relatively simple reflection in the puddle and so on.

What’s interesting here is that the commentator is clearly talking from today’s point of view. First of all, Banjo was a TV special which meant you couldn’t go too dark and more important: it wasn’t really common to have characters strongly affected by ambient light in mainstream animation unless it was inevitable (disco lights for example). It sure is a way to help root drawn characters in a painted environment, but it doesn’t necessarily make for an interesting picture.

The character certainly reads more clearly this way. Unlike standard Disney practice in the 60s and 70s, not even Banjo’s color value changes, whether he is inside or in front of the can. Of course, it would have been more expensive to have so many color models but usually during that era character colors were just changing value, not hue. As is common, the night time blue has some effect on Banjo’s fur compared to the following set of screen shots where he is seen under “normal” lighting circumstances:

Note that Banjo is the one cat in the family with the strongest contrast between light and dark fur and he’s also the got the most saturated orange fur. Even his eyes are bluer than those of the other cats.

It has often been said that Bluth’s rise ultimately led to Disney’s recovery during the Katzenberg-Eisner era, so I think it’s interesting to have a look at how Bluth’s striving for rich-looking color effects affected character – background color relations during those years. Of course, what is accepted as visual realism in live-action Hollywood films has also changed a lot over this period and has certainly influenced animated features.

The evolution of style I present here is sketched only in broad strokes and by no means exhausting or without exceptions.

Let’s have a look at a few frames from Disney’s The Rescuers (1977) on which Bluth worked as a directing animator:

Bianca is always the whitest mouse around so she’s easy to spot. Like in most classic Hollywood films the male hero is considerably darker complexion than the heroine (think of Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, for example). Bernard’s gray body tends to blend in with the surroundings while Bianca is literally brighter.

This is how they look in their rain outfit inside the orphanage.

And this is how they look outside in the rain at night (some sort of leftovers from an earlier incarnation of the story involving zoo animals). A tad bluer, but not even much darker than inside (it is different during the climax with Penny in the cave however). This is by no means a lavish or sophisticated production but the visuals work. We don’t feel that the characters don’t belong into their surroundings any less than in other lighting situations.

Now Don Bluth was trying to restore the glorious days of Pinocchio and Bambi with his first feature The Secret of Nimh (1982). He obviously paid a lot of attention to colors and special effects to make them look as good as it gets. In fact, to me this became a real problem in Bluth’s later films because his love for effects seemed to overwhelm his initial good intentions.

These are stills from the same scene in which almost all the shots seem to have their own color scheme. Note also how much more dramatic the lighting is here with a clear pool of light.


The characters were actually colored in different hues and not just adjusted in later color grading as is clearly visible from the Mrs Brisby’s red/magenta cape.

In 1988 Disney still used the same inexpensive coloring style on Oliver & Company. In some of the backgrounds there is a very superficial Bakshi influence visible, by the way. Remember that this was after Bluth and Spielberg had a hit with An American Tail (1986).

Oliver stands out by his more saturated fur and only gets darker in rainy night scenes.

Only one year later, The little Mermaid demonstrates a crucial leap in relative lavishness.

The “normal” character color schemes apply to standard lighting above and below sea level. Since Ariel is at home under the sea it would have been strange had the colors been altered to simulate underwater photography. The characters read especially well in front of the dark underwater backgrounds. The lighting is like in classic cartoons without cast shadows and consideration for light sources.

This continues in darker scenes under water, but changes during the more important “Part of Your World” musical sequence:

Suddenly there are expensive shadows and the whole background is kept in shades of blue. Ariel, Flounder and Sebastian are immediately affected by the top lighting. Of course this is expressionist lighting during a song that expresses Ariel’s deepest yearnings. But it is seamlessly incorporated into the rest of the film.

In the immediately following shots after the song, the blue background and the darker character values stay, but the hues are more “normal” again. There are no cast shadows anymore. This switching from expensive to standard occurs quite a bit in respect to the relative importance of the visuals. It always reminds me of Brad Bird’s commandment: “not all shots are created equal”.

In contrast to earlier Disney features, skin tones change quite a bit as can be seen looking at Eric and the sailors under different weather conditions.

It is characteristic that the first time Ariel sees Eric, he is seen in “normal” lighting, although the scenes play at night on the ship.
Eric’s blue eyes stay blue no matter what.

During the rescue sequence the lighting changes gradually and the character hues change accordingly. Again we have hard lighting and therefore visible cast shadows.

The “Kiss the Girl” love scene is worth noting for several characteristics: The characters’ colors are very close to the surrounding blue and turquoise. Compared to The Banjo or Rescuers night scene they don’t read to well by contrast of hue. It’s even more surprising that in many shot Eric and Ariel are not clearly lighter or darker than the backgrounds value-wise. Again this is an important scene, so the color scheme is more expressive, but there is no dramatic or artificial lighting, just diffuse dusk.


And now - you might want to cover your eyes – let’s have a look at the picture I’ve always considered the swan song of Disney’s Katzenberg era: Pocahontas (1995). Maybe it is telling that this film features 27 story credits (true, Katzenberg left 1994, but this was already in production).

Right from the beginning there is a strong sense of stylized and oversaturated color. However John Smith’s skin tones contrast very well with all the gray and blue around him.


The storm sequence features some brilliant special effects but even more than a similar scene in The Little Mermaid, it tries to imitate live-action film making. While the contrasting skin tones of Smith and Thomas are great for readability in those short action shots, the crew is depicted in more “realistic” fashion with skin tones that almost blend in with the surroundings.

But in the most emotional part of the scene when Smith grabs young Thomas their faces too become gray blue as if they were already presumed dead. The characters are more difficult to distinguish, though. It’s only afterwards on the ship that skin tones are re-established. Michael Giaimo’s art direction plays the whole bandwith between these two extremes.


Although Pocahontas strains the concept of backgrounds limited to one or two hues or at least neighboring colors, the characters sometimes are seen under “normal” lighting conditions with skin tones in the new world always on the pink side.


During the “Colors of the Wind” song sequence the already highly stylized setting is even more exaggerated. The generally disturbing lack of neutral earth tones in the backgrounds is taken ad nauseam in these scenes. More than in Ariel’s cave the expressionist lighting affects the character colors very strongly. To be fair, Pocahontas is by no means an historically or geographically accurate retelling but an increasingly stagey reworking of a legend.
The one-hue scheme is taken even further shortly before war breaks out. Even the wise old tree is no blue in front of blue. Basically we have come full circle to early silent films with blue toning. The third picture in that blue row is from inside the tent where Smith is waiting to be executed. At the moment of maximum tension there is a minimum of color contrast and a maximum of skin tone distortion.

In the war preparing scenes the settlers are red and the native Americans blue (maybe they are supposed to hurt our eyes as some kind of subtext that war is cruel).



The climax gets more and more stylized to the point where the whole setup resembles a stage musical. In that sense the strong colored lighting is only coherent and accounts for the lack of earthly grays and browns. Regardless of taste or such matters, there hasn’t been a Disney movie that pushed the character – background color coherence so far. And here it is clearly not for the effect of following live-action realism tastes but as an obtrusive means of expression.

In general, most Hollywood movies follow contemporary tastes in lighting, consciously or not. So to break the mould and have something fresh looking, sometimes it is just enough to do what was once fashionable (see Lilo and Stitch’s watercolor backgrounds that were largely inspired by Elmer Elephant (1935) and Dumbo (1940)). Of course it’s always desirable that color schemes were inspired by imagination rather than degrees of realism and mainstream tastes, but then one shouldn’t probably look for it in mainstream movies.

After seeing trailers and short clips from Disney's upcoming Princess and the Frog I'm very curious and a little uneasy about how much it seems to be influenced by Don Bluth style, not only color-wise that is...