In an innovative process, Disney released its first color film just under ten years after its founding; find out which one it is!
When Disney was founded in 1923 by Roy It is Walt Disney, cinematographic resources were still simple and often did not produce satisfactory results. An example is the use of colors in films, which had been seen on screen for decades, but, in addition to being laborious, time-consuming and expensive to do, it did not convey a good realistic or illustrative quality and, therefore, lost interest. of filmmakers in applying them in their narratives and of the public in watching them in cinemas.
It was then that Walt saw an opportunity to innovate. As reported by the official blog of The Walt Disney Family museum, Walt reminded the journalist Pete Martin that there was a constant desire to apply colors to the studio’s narratives, but the way it had been done until then did not satisfy him: “I was always interested in colors, but the color in the film at the time wasn’t very good. It wasn’t very successful in theaters because there was a certain blurry quality to it.”
Thus, in the 1930s, Technicolor, a company that had been developing in the field for years, introduced a new process where three separate rolls of film, each of a different color, red, green and blue, had to be combined in the camera to create colorful images. (before that, only two colors were combined, green and red), bringing new possibilities, as the result of the new process created images with vivid colors, something difficult to achieve previously.
As a result, Walt saw the three-strip Technicolor film as an opportunity to create his first color film — and he did so with “Flowers and Trees,” a short film released in 1932 as one of the projects in the studio’s experimental series, “Silly Symphonies.” .
Directed by Burt Gillett, the animation follows the romance that is born between two anthropomorphized trees and they face a great drama: the attack of a decomposing trunk that wants to destroy the house they both have in the forest. Remember!
Still, the process of producing the film was not easy. This is because Disney had started producing the short in black and white, as the historian writes Michael Barrier, making it necessary to redo the entire duration already completed. Additionally, it was time consuming, as weeks of film testing were required to refine the color selection, and in order to use the three-strip technique, the cartoon also had to be photographed at Technicolor’s own facilities.
As much work as it required, the result was rewarded, as the short became the first animation of the Disney receiving the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, awarded in November of the same year.
Source: Recreio
