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...

Animation and Illustration Links

Manga Impact (5th – 15th August 2009)

To find one’s way on the website of the Locarno International Film Festival is always quite exhausting, so let me put the good news upfront: Pom Poko (1994) by Isao Takahata will be shown on the Piazza Grande (Thursday, 6th August 2009) in the context of a large anime retrospective called “Manga Impact”. Especially interesting is the focus on pre-Ghibli films dating back to the 1920s, some of them newly restored.


Illustrative 09 Berlin (16th October – 1st November 2009)

This year the International Illustration Forum „Illustrative 09” will take place in Berlin “to celebrate the cutting-edge works of contemporary graphic art for the fifth time around. From the 16th of October to the 1st of November, works ranging from drawing, graphic prints, painting and monumental mural collages to graphically inspired 3D-illustrations, book art and animation will be on show.”

Check the website (www.illustrative.de) for more information.

The deadline for the Swatch Young Illustrators Award 2009 is September 30th, 2009. You can also submit animation! All the nominees will be invited to Berlin, which is always worth a visit.

On the illustrative blog, David O’Reilly posted an interesting essay about his approach to creating coherent worlds. He’s discussing his latest (award-winning) short Please Say Something which I have seen in Annecy. Although I didn’t particularly like the film, I agree with most of what David writes about aesthetic coherence.

His basic premise is “that the key to aesthetics is coherence. In 3d we essentially create artificial models of worlds, I contend that what makes these worlds believable is simply how coherent they are; how all the elements tie together under a set of rules which govern them consistently.”

In much the same way as Sita sings the Blues, O’Reilly’s Please Say Something “makes no effort to cover up the fact that it is a computer animation, it holds an array of artifacts which distance it from reality, which tie it closer to the software it came from. This idea is in direct opposition to all current trends in animation, which take the route of desperately trying to look real, usually by realistic lighting and rendering, or by forcing a hand-made or naive appearance. At the time of writing, this trend shows no apparent signs of ceasing.”

Read the whole essay here.

(via Cathrin Täffner)

Inbetween VIII

Watercolor over photocopies

Annecy 2009

This year’s festival didn’t have as many great events as last year’s, but the short film competition, which to me is the heart of such a festival, was quite strong. In other words: despite the lack of fresh air in the auditorium and an overkill of short films, I didn’t fall asleep as often as in previous years during these programs. Overall the shorts were highly entertaining, with some inflated platitudes and even less really thoughtful pieces. Though I liked a lot of the films, I couldn’t name one outstanding favorite. Despite that, I was quite surprised about some of the short film awards as they were predictable but not justified in my opinion (Man in the blue Gordini, Slavar) or simply puzzling (Please Say Something).

As Serge Bromberg, Annecy’s artistic director, said in his introduction speech: the audience is the most important ingredient in any successful festival. Seeing any movie in the packed Grande Salle du Bonlieu is an indescribable experience. The crowd seems to be so willing to embrace whatever is put in front of them that even mediocre films are greeted like major events. The traditional pre-show ritual consisting of throwing paper planes to the screen, a clap-along trailer and a different Gobélin intro for each day never fails to bring down the house already before the main attraction starts.

The most interesting films were clearly in the feature category. There may not have been such a breath of fresh air like Sita sings the Blues, but of the nine features I have seen, my favorite four have been stop motion films, that - with the exception of Coraline - didn’t follow genre conventions even though they succeeded in telling emotionally engaging stories. There seems to be a general assumption that animated features, even so-called daring ones like Wall-E and Up, have to follow the American blockbuster formula, no matter what content or target audience. This may be economically justified because of the high costs of big studio animation and thus the need to appeal to the lowest common denominator of all audience groups. But what bothers me most is that this development isn’t even questioned by top critics like Todd McCarthy. If it’s animation it has to follow the action film pattern. And although most of the big studio features have more in common with live-action blockbuster than cartoons, their problems and inconsistencies are overlooked as long as what is on the screen looks like a labor of love.

Well, Australia of all countries has proven this assumption wrong. Emotional payoff can be gracefully achieved without villains and the mandatory chase/action sequence near the end of the movie. In fact, 9.99$ and Mary and Max demonstrate that animated features can tackle subjects and styles more common to independent art house movies and still make you laugh and cry (in the case of Mary and Max).

9.99$ as most of you already know by now is a “large city film” focused on characters rather than story. Its episodic structure is based on short stories by Etgar Keret with intersecting characters. In short, Tatia Rosenthal’s 9.99$ is a film about real people struggling to break out of their mediocrity. It can be argued that this is something far better suited to live-action and that there are already many films that fit the pattern. It is the kind of film Robert Altman, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu and in Australia Ray Lawrence (Lantana, Jindabyne) have become associated with. For the first half hour I wondered why they made a puppet film out of it, even though the moody sets and lighting had a lot going for them. The puppets still looked somehow stilted and awkward at times, but the voice acting carried a lot of the performance (that’s saying a lot, considering that I usually believe that voice actors are terribly overrated). But the more fantastical elements of the story - it does include a recurring angel and talking chairs - blended in more naturally this way than they would have with real actors. After all, I never grow tired of seeing how ordinary people cope with life’s adversities and I can’t recall having seen it in an animated feature recently. (On a side note: why Monsters vs. Aliens was shown in competition but 9.99$ wasn’t, remains a mystery to me).

But for me (and the jury) the real winner was Adam Elliot’s Mary and Max telling the story of unlikely pen pals Mary Daisy Dinkle, an 8 year old Australian, and 44 year old autistic Max Jerry Horovitz from New York. Premise and unappealing character design may look very similar to Elliot’s long short Harvey Krumpet, but execution and storytelling are light years ahead of it. It has everything, gags, brilliant music, smooth animation, zany subtleties and most of all heart. Real heart, never sentimental, but deeply touching, you cannot watch this movie without a lump in your throat. And yes, it cost only about 8 million Australian dollars.
Apart from some small parts by Toni Collette, Philipp Seymour Hoffmann and some others, most of the film is carried by a wonderful narrator. Although the subject matter is clearly adult, it doesn’t have to rely on offensive imagery.

I was a little afraid of the new Wallace and Gromit adventure, because I feared that Nick Park may have lost his touch with those most beloved characters. No need to worry, though. While the formula is showing, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The W&G shorts have always depended on atmospheric tongue-in-cheek storytelling where the spectator and silent Gromit are ahead of Wallace. They may talk a little more this time, but my favourite scenes are still the ones where we see Gromit’s thought process through a minimum of animation. The dog has once again saved the day.

And then there was Lost and Found by Philipp Hunt, a real gem. I had to sit through a heap of unbearable TV episodes and specials just to see this story about friendship, and it was worth every minute. What Mary and Max is to adult animation, Lost and Found is to the family audience. It’s hard to believe that such a heart warming film has been given the green light in a environment. Come to think of it, Lost and Found was the only 3D animation I’ve liked in the whole festival.

And there was the other 3D, a.k.a TruD, RealD, stereoscopic vision etc. There have been stereoscopic projections before in Annecy, but this year, 3D took center stage with four movies released that way. I have managed to see all of those in the Grande Salle except for the Nightmare Before Christmas which I have already seen in 3D. While it worked very well for Coraline, which by the way is the first film I can’t imagine in any other format, Monsters vs. Aliens was less impressive and The Battle for Terra was outright terrible (nice message, bad execution), also due to projection errors. The two computer animated features showcased all the deficiencies of digital projection. It’s a pity that all my prejudices against this projection technology were cemented.

The last screening I attended was the Saturday morning “carte blanche” for Jean-Pierre Jeunet which was in his own words more like a “carte grise” (a grey card rather than a white card), because he chose most of the films from a list the festival suggested to him. As a fan of his films I was curious about his personal favorites. The program was solid (nice to see Harvey Krumpet in the context of Mary and Max) but without surprises: nothing unexpected, mostly evergreens that tended towards the dark and quirky as one could expect from the director of films like La Cité des Enfants Perdus / The City of Lost Children (1995).

I asked myself what films I would select if I had to compile a roadshow reel of shorts from a certain festival. Not all of the following shorts are among the most important, some are just plain fun, because I believe that you have to have those very short, funny films as buffers between the heavier ones.

1. Retouches (5:13)
2. Western Spaghetti (1:45)
3. El Empleo (6:19)
4. Runaway (8:40)
5. The Additional Capabilites of the Snout (5:15)
6. Mei Ling (15:36)
7. Tiny Legs of Fire (1:30)
8. The Cat Piano (8:28)
9. Muto (7:00)
10. Syötti (4:32)
11. Birth (11:45)
12. Codswallop (3:40)
13. The Tale of Little Puppetboy (18:35)

Fleischer Lighting

"I never made love in Technicolor"

Before I take off for Annecy later this afternoon I’d like to do a short post about the use of realistic lighting using examples from two late Fleischer cartoons in Technicolor, both made down in Florida.
A longer article about the “imitation of lighting” in American animation will hopefully follow after the festival later this month.

Aladdin and his wonderful lamp (1939) is not only the last but at 22 minutes also the longest of the three Technicolor Popeye two-reelers. It isn’t the most imaginative though and there’s not a single shot done in the Fleischer’s then trademark “Stereoptical Process”.

I’d like to focus on one single scene that features colored light emitted by gems and diamonds:

First we see princess Olive’s room in natural high key lighting, similar to live-action color epics of the time.

Then Olive opens several boxes each holding a different colored gem inside. To emphasize the glowing effect of the stones, her whole room reflects each stone’s color. This may be unnatural but is a fairly accepted convention.

Let’s have a closer look at Olive in the red and especially the green picture: as expected, there is some modeling (light and shadow areas) on her body. But when in reality the side closer to the gem (her front) would have to be reflecting the stone’s color more strongly, it is exactly the other way round (especially in the green picture). Olive’s shadow side that in reality wouldn’t be green because her body would block out the green light is all green like the rest of the room. Of course, this goes unnoticed because it makes for a more readable image than had it been handled realistically. Not only is there more contrast of value in Olive than in her immediate surroundings, but she’s also the only thing in the picture that contrasts with the room’s overall color, most notably the spots of red, and she’s also wearing different colors. Her skintone is more or less “natural”.

I personally think that this unrealistic lighting effect makes for a far more interesting picture. Note that the white light in the third picture only bleaches out the surroundings and doesn’t affect colors too much. Here the framing bed looks even stronger than Olive. Naturally, seeing the scene in movement, Olive would still be the center of attraction.

Just to prove that unrealistic lighting must have clearly been a conscious artistic decision, let’s look at how the same people handled light sources and modeling in Superman a.k.a. The Mad Scientist (1941):

Right from the beginning, there is modeling on the characters. People working on these Superman shorts have repeatedly talked about how they tried to keep in mind where the principal light sources were located in every shot. And going through this first entry in the series shot by shot, you can see that they stick to it probably to a higher degree than anybody before them.

I will discuss the amazing color work and production design of these short in more detail later, because there really is a lot to admire in these films. But for now, just look at how realistically the lighting is handled in the following screen shots. The low key lighting itself is rather influenced by expressionistic live-action crime films of the time and therefore not realistic in the sense that it resembles the real world, but within the shots everything is totally coherent.


Now here we have the counterpart to the Olive scene from above: in Superman, even skintones are deeply affected by lighting changes, something that was quite uncommon in the early 40s.





Near the end of the short, there are several lightning flashes and explosions. With the characters already lit in colored light and shadow, the flashes had to really stand out. It’s amazing to see how the cel painters obviously painted on top of the cels in what looks like dry-brush or some frosted cel technique.


Of course, in the end the warm evening (or morning) colors take over again.

After managing to reserve most of the desired screenings despite the traditional breakdown of Annecy’s online ticketing system, I’m now really excited about the following week. I hope to see all of the shorts in competition and as many features as possible.