Having grown up on a lot of those films, I definitely prefer the 35 mm format. While I have nothing particularly against the digital restorations, the 35 mm format just hits so different. There’s so much nostalgia there!
We lean toward the 35 mm versions ourselves -- there's a lot of subtlety, complexity and balance in them that we miss in the digital transfers! It can feel like a key part of the intended images, the part added by recording on physical film, was lost along the way.
Interesting article, as usual! It's worth noting that because monitors vary, ultimately if you're watching a 35mm scan the colours likely won't look exactly the way they did in a cinema - it all depends on the way the scan is colour graded. Getting colours right is a really complex issue that I don't know nearly enough about.
Thanks very much! Definitely, the theater experience is its own thing -- you can only approximate it on a computer. Plus, even in the analog film era, colors varied slightly from print to print and changed over the years. Scans raise their own questions.
At the same time, we've compared the existing 35 mm scans of Toy Story to the '90s LaserDisc release, and to the View-Master stills of Toy Story that came out in the '90s. They're all similar in color and texture -- and all very different from the later digital transfers. Early home releases of the Disney renaissance films also resemble the 35 mm copies much more than they do the current versions.
For sure, there's a massive discussion to have about the exact, specific way that Toy Story and the rest were intended to look. This isn't the last word on the subject by any means. We just wanted to bring it up and show the broad-strokes differences, as an intro for folks who aren't familiar with this whole debate from the film-preservation world. We'll leave the final calls to the experts!
Of course - I'm definitely not saying you're mistaken about the difference in look, it's more I wouldn't want people to click on a 35mm scan trailer on youtube and think they're seeing how that print would have looked in cinemas because that depends on the scanner, colour grade, and the monitor. It's definitely possible to guess at how the differences. I am kind of curious if you watched the laserdisks on a CRT monitor because that would presumably be the display technology they were mastered for, but I imagine getting that working is a bit of a hassle these days!
Good points -- it won't be the experience 1:1, even if it's closer. Would be great to see film restoration pros get their hands on the original negatives for these films one day, because there's no chance Disney doesn't have them stashed somewhere. Also, unfortunately, you're right that we don't have a CRT up and running at the moment! We're a bit behind on our old-media setup, even though so much animation hasn't been re-released since VHS or LD. Something we've thought about exploring and probably will need to do, once there's an opportunity.
Yeah. Disney are pretty notorious for revisionist colour grading/Digital Noise Reduction of their analogue films (not to mention occasionally removing problematic elements like in Fantasia) so I imagine the digital films, which would probably be even more complex to identify the original intended look for, would not be particularly authentic. I remember hearing good things about the new Cinderella 4K, I believe, though? I've seen comparisons suggesting that the Fantasia bluray looks significantly different to the original prints. I've actually seen Bambi on a re-release print (i.e. not one from the 40s, probably from the 60s or later as it was not Nitrate) but I've never compared it to the blu-ray. That might be interesting someday! I recall Sleeping Beauty looking a bit too smooth and grainless, even by the standards of Disney blu-rays. But that's a different matter again. For some reason film preservation/restoration philosophy is just one of those things I can think about for ages.
Just had another thought - I wonder if the 35mm trailer scans you so often see look different again to the actual release prints because I suspect they would be more generations removed from the original materials? I wouldn't be surprised if the generation loss maybe made them a little more washed-out or something like that (as well as softer). I guess it depends on whether the source for the trailers was the digital master or film masters. I don't know either way, and I guess it would have depended on the era. But just struck me as something that might be worth looking into.
It's an interesting question. Trailers are also often made well before the film is finalised, and before a final colour grade has been decided on and applied. It could well be that identical scenes in a 35mm trailer looks different to the same scene in the 35mm feature.
I have some matching trailers and features on 35mm, I should have a look at them and compare them.
I also have multiple copies of one film from different labs, I haven't yet compared them but assume they would look visibly different when projected next to each other.
As a Pixar insider for over twenty years, any mention/acknowledgement of the photo science group and David D's work makes me very Ghee Happy. Well done, for covering yet another invisible layer in our medium and its eventual delivery.
Around the early 90’s I was just getting into lo-fi CGI on an Amiga 2000 that was bringing in some paid work on TV commercials.
Most of this work had to go through a post house, The Mill, in London, then quite new, and my computer would be taxi’d in for them to hot-wire into their digital edit suites to output the best quality to D1 digital video.
I had an idea around then to try and preserve the work on film & so invested in a desktop digital to film settup based around a “Lasergraphics” digital film recorder attached to a custom built 35mm film printer connected to and controlling the Amiga via custom software.
Suffice to say that apart from a few tests I never really got acceptable results since it was virtually impossible outside of the sphere of financially well supported post houses like The Mill or big film studios with deep pockets..:)
The Lasergraphics film recorder was also 3X the cost of the film back so I settled for a second hand Polaroid film recorder intended to image digital to 35mm slide film via a CRT so there was already a huge drop in output quality.
I don’t think even The Mill’s digital to film system around then was based around the Solitaire, at the time the best of its kind, and when you saw ads screened for cinema it really showed, with obvious aliasing and so on.
This is fascinating stuff! Thanks for sharing these stories from the era -- a lot of this is totally new to us. Will have to keep The Mill in mind for the future, as we continue to study early digital animation.
The London post house scene in the late 80’s was interesting since it was really playing catch up with the U.S in terms of access to technology.
It’s worth noting that some CGI landmark work, thanks to the boom in pop videos, resulted in groundbreaking work like the “Money For Nothing” video, made using (I think), a Cubicomp system out of Rushes post production, owned by Virgin.
And…not to blow my own trumpet a little, in the early 80’s one of my first jobs in animation was to assist in the creation of Paul McCartney’s animated “MPL” logo, still in use until today, that was a hybrid of 2D drawn animation & a very basic CGI plotting system and hand rendered animation through Shootsey Studios for director Len Lewis.
This reminds me of some tweets I saw a while back from Jonathan Gibbs (he worked at PDI iirc) around the time of the release of Shrek in UHD. He talked about how it was only rendered at 1828 pixels across because they were made for 35mm film. Also the images were 4:1:1 JPEG compressed at 98% quality to save space. So the film print would help obscure some of those quality issues.
I love the softness and the muted colors of the 35mm versions. I grew up in an analog world working as a newspaper photographer, developing and printing in primarily black and white in our in-house photo labs, so there is a deep nostalgia for me.
Thank you so much -- very kind! And agreed about the 35 mm ones. There's definitely a place for saturated, sharp, hyper-digital art in the world, but we love the analog look for these films.
Colour reproduction is such a complicated topic! Even with digital media you absolutely can't rely on different display devices having the same primaries, white point, gamma etc etc. and the introduction of 'HDR' standards that aren't being followed properly by manufacturers, and on-by-default TV functions that mess with the saturation, sharpen the image etc. is making it even messier. (I saw a good video a while back comparing all the different versions of The Matrix and discussing the history behind them, I'll have to see if I can find it again.)
You basically can't get even a semblance of consistent colour without either shelling out for a very expensive colour accurate monitor or using a calibrator (typically about £100) to profile your monitor and hope that any given application is colour managed. Even then, you have to hope that the person who created the image was *also* aware of colour spaces and using a calibrated monitor, or else you still won't be seeing what they're seeing.
The additional curse, or perhaps saving grace, is that the human eye is constantly adapting its colour perception anyway, so it may well adjust to different display devices, and much as relative pitch is more important than absolute pitch, the relations between colours may be more important than making sure they look the same on two side by side monitors.
Still... it does seem like we should be able to reproduce the effects of 35mm film with some kind of tonemapping function, and apply the '35mm look' digitally. Kind of baffling that these digital transfers went for such a saturated look if the intended look of the film was on film. Though we treat 'intended look' like it's one definite thing and reality is of course kind of fuzzy...
Thanks for the article, it's really cool to learn about this part of the digital transition!
Thanks for the very thoughtful comment, as always! We've seen the Matrix comparisons ourselves, and they're pretty shocking -- the film got kind of butchered over time. From what we've read, the look of many older live-action movies has radically changed in the past couple of decades, often for the worse.
We're not sure about Disney's reasons for handling the re-releases this way, either. Idris may very well be correct that the movies were reworked on purpose -- it seems likely. Some shots make us wonder, though: did raw digital art get dropped on DVD and streaming, in certain cases?
There are color decisions (like the green of the army men) that feel custom-designed to change when printed. Certain shots in The Lion King almost seem to be missing multiple-exposure tricks that the 35 mm version had, too. It's really strange. The fact that Toy Story's UHD Blu-ray corrects the colors away from the hyper-saturated DVD/streaming versions suggests that something was, in fact, wrong with the earlier ones. But we're not sure what the deal is there.
Anyway, really glad you enjoyed the piece! We've been going down this rabbit hole a while ourselves, and there's definitely more that could be said beyond our brief intro here. Revisiting early computer animation on 35 mm, it looks way different, and has aged far better than a lot people give it credit for!
I'd definitely be keen for more posts along these lines! Early computer animation is such an interesting topic - it would, for instance, be fascinating to find out more about the really early days, stuff like Tron, for instance, and how that has been handled in remasters. If I recall correctly there were multiple effects houses contributing different sequences, which makes me wonder if they might all have been transferred to film in different ways, I don't know. And - although you might already have covered this - I believe that the CG gears in The Great Mouse Detective's clock tower scene were actually transferred to animation paper with a plotter, hand-drawn characters added, and then everything xeroxed and painted like all the other cel animation. That blending of digital and analogue is fascinating to me, kind of like Cannon Fodder (which you have covered).
It's definitely a fascinating thing to research -- will keep this suggestion in mind! That anecdote about Great Mouse Detective is new to us and very cool. Tron may show up in some form in the newsletter, too, because it was influential on some of the people who later became Pixar. We've got our eye on some of Pixar's early shorts, Luxo Jr. especially, for articles in the future.
I'd say a more saturated look could maybe be explained by in part a desire to appeal to children combined with the infinite flexibility of digital emboldening colour graders to just try stuff they couldn't have done on film and getting to like the look.
Wow, that's really cool. I never really thought about how they had to somehow get their digital images onto physical film. It's just really cool in general that they had to think about how the images would look on film and adjust accordingly. It’s just not something you really think about! There’s so much behind the scenes work that someone on the outside could never even begin to consider. Great work as always!
Thanks so much! We've been growing really interested in this question lately -- how early CG animation was originally targeted at film stock. The look of it is really specific and cool, and something we remember clearly from the '90s and '00s. A subject we intend to keep studying, for sure!
Andreas Deja had some good rants on his blog back in the day about how Disney was deliberately re-grading their films for Blu-Ray/streaming in order to appeal to perceived tastes of the day rather than the artists' original intentions. And I suspect he ought to know ...
Disney's handling of its restored editions has long been pretty controversial -- particularly with the classic catalog. One day, we'd love to watch scans of Pinocchio and Snow White (to name two) that have the seal of approval from film-preservation sticklers.
How is it possibile you're always capable to talk about animation in a nerdy, yet compelling and original perspective? I wish all the topic read on Substack could be dealt in this way.
Great article as always! I had seen the comparisons but never knew the digital-film-digital conundrum, I thought they had just oversaturated the colors to justify the blu-ray re-release. You mentioned that with DVDs they could put the digital version of the movie, but do you know how VHS versions compare with the 35mm and digital formats? (Maybe it's the same and I just don't know enough about how VHS works 😅)
Thank you! And the VHS/LaserDisc editions of Toy Story are extremely similar to the 35 mm in color. According to what we've read, it was standard to base home video versions of movies on the 35 mm originals -- just converting them to tape. You can definitely see it when you compare the different releases of Toy Story side by side. The VHS/LD editions of The Lion King (to name one) are also much, much closer to the 35 mm copy than to the later digital transfers.
Ooh, thank you for sharing!! I'm so glad my family has kept some of these, makes me think of a new activity for the holidays: doing side by side comparisons with the streaming versions 🤓
You forgot to mention that for the 2000 DVD release, the film was actually re-rendered. It is said that the original rendered frames weren't properly archived digitally after they were transferred to film stock, so they re-rendered the movie, and this re-render was used for almost all digital versions since, but some errors were accidentally introduced. In the scene where they first see the mutant toys shortly after Sid ripped the head of Hannah's "Janie" doll and put a pterodactyl's head, the 35mm version (and the 3D version, which was another re-render, one that was VERY difficult) features the Janie doll's body consistently with the correct texture, but for the 2000 dvd and most digital versions since then, in one shot, the doll has the wrong texture (of a tea party doll) instead. Another one was during the scene in which Sid interrogates Woody, on the digital versions since the 2000 re-render (Except for the 3D re-release), there was no motion blur in the scene where Woody freaks out after being burned in the forehead, but the original 35mm version DID have the motion blur for that scene. (remember that the 35mm version was what was released on home media before the 2000 DVD) A lesser known error that was accidentally introduced after it was re-rendered for the 2000 DVD, after "Birthday Guests at 3 O'Clock" and the toys react, we see text flash on Mr. Spell's LCD by mistake, something we do NOT see on the 35mm version. Again, just as I thought, the directly digital version of Toy Story is not an accurate representation of how the film was completed and released in 1995 because that wasn't even a consideration back then, and the filmmakers KNEW that the movie would ultimately be on film (even in the digital versions, negative cutters, color timers, and film processing are all mentioned in the credits. Such credits also remain on later Pixar films even when directly digital was a consideration). I personally prefer 35mm, rather than direct digital, especially for older digitally animated films. While individual prints varied, remember that there were intentional color timing choices in the film as well, said choices were removed for the digital versions.
Do you have any views about the future of the animation medium now with AI encroaching?
I am a journalist and have been investigating AI critically the last few weeks and have grown very concerned on all sorts of issues related to it. I was initially optimistic about AI as making computer animation more accessible to the masses and was hoping to use for my publishing company but now that I have studied it more deeply I have grown so skeptical, particularly on the ethical grounds.
What do you think?
Perhaps a revival of more traditional animation as a backlash? I have been drifting toward more writing by hand again.
GenAI has been the major topic in animation for a few years, and big companies are very much into it. We don't really cover GenAI-powered projects here, as a policy. Beyond the serious ethical problems, we also haven't seen much of anything interesting done with it! The technology is good at outputting cliche, boring and nonspecific art of a type that doesn't appeal to us.
GenAI animation is already getting a ton of traction on YouTube and other video platforms, and it may break into theaters eventually. But people seem to engage with it on a very superficial level -- they may watch it, but it doesn't seem to connect in the way that (for example) an Illumination movie or Glitch series does. And there's a lot of backlash against GenAI animation among fans to boot. How that ultimately develops is still to be seen, but it's something we're keeping an eye on!
Thank you. It’s been helpful talking to others in different fields and getting their perspectives on it. Glad to hear you’re coming to similar conclusions about it.
I feel like I really gave the AI boosters more than a fair day in court to make their case but ultimately the tools just don’t work very well. And because of that, it makes all the ethical issues even more glaring. We’ve grown so accustomed to those debates about tech progress and making trade offs and so on. That doesn’t seem to as be as much of the case here. People across fields are just more and more finding that these programs aren’t living up to the hype.
I really like this article, especially as I study film revision.
I would say that it points to how intentionality when it comes to color grading, especially in the digital era, can be a fickle thing. The way we see our movies is always impacted or mediated by technology - transfer technology, projection technology, delivery formats (eg. DVD, BluRay), etc. And that technology is constantly changing. Thus, what the film looks like evolves with it.
The base or 'source' material/data largely remains the same but the exhibition version's colors are always modified in the transfer process. Directors and colorists then tend to tailor the grade to take the best advantage of the output format. But because outputs can be quite different and have different demands and technical parameters (eg. 35mm print vs. HD LED TV ), the grade of each exhibition version can be quite different in turn
Moreover, the position of the filmmakers over how the film should look today isn't necessarily the same as when it initially came out. And then how we see it further depends on the conditions of exhibition- eg. brightness of the cinema screen or color settings of the 4k TV.
I don't think there is thus necessarily a 'correct' or 'proper' color for many of these works. And as I like to say, there is a paradox when it comes to film preservation in the digital era: to be preserved, a film must remain accessible but to remain accessible, it must be modernized.
Thanks for the kind words and very thoughtful comment! You've made a lot of good points here. Just see the recent dispute about Eyes Wide Shut's colors in the Criterion release -- a lot of people disagree on this stuff, including people who worked on the films!
The place that Toy Story and the '90s Disney movies fall in this debate is a little unusual, since (from what we can gather) the versions on Blu-ray and streaming today aren't just regraded to suit a new format, but are in many cases simply exports of the original data. Comparing different versions of Mulan with screenshots of raw CAPS output, we noticed decisions that were strange in the digital versions but looked great on 35 mm and VHS, like a glaring yellow in the sky that turned into a natural cream color when printed. Effects that look cheap in the digital versions also got polished/hidden on 35 mm and VHS.
You see similar stuff in Toy Story, where the streaming version of the army men is a bright green. As others have mentioned, it doesn't match the color of those toys in real life, like the 35 mm version does. That Ralph Eggleston quote in the piece seems to imply that Pixar made the original, digital colors "wrong" on purpose for the sake of getting the right colors on the physical negative. The 2019 Blu-ray got away from the bright green and went closer to the darker one seen on the 35 mm print, which seems to suggest that the colors seen on streaming were an error all along.
Among film preservation buffs, Disney is pretty infamous for its re-releases of its classic catalog. It wouldn't be shocking if suboptimal decisions got made on some of these digital transfers as well. If nothing else, we'd love to see digital releases of the old films regraded to more closely match the colors that were planned to show up during the analog recording/developing process! Maybe one day.
You’re welcome and thank you for the response! I can certainly see more transfers and re-grades from the original data happening down the line, which will be raise more questions as we move into the realm of 8k remastering and even higher definition streaming.
Enjoyable read. Interesting to think which version is the most faithful to the original. Definitely something gained with the transfer to analogue, where limitations led to a positive outcome!
When making digital art/compositing in photoshop, adding grain and some roughness to the final product is a technique used to unify all the elements and soften everything into a more cohesive look
Thank you! And that's a really good point about Photoshop -- while working on this article, we had a similar thought about the use of texture overlays to bring the elements of a digital image together. You definitely feel a gap when it's removed in those Disney and Pixar films.
Having grown up on a lot of those films, I definitely prefer the 35 mm format. While I have nothing particularly against the digital restorations, the 35 mm format just hits so different. There’s so much nostalgia there!
We lean toward the 35 mm versions ourselves -- there's a lot of subtlety, complexity and balance in them that we miss in the digital transfers! It can feel like a key part of the intended images, the part added by recording on physical film, was lost along the way.
Interesting article, as usual! It's worth noting that because monitors vary, ultimately if you're watching a 35mm scan the colours likely won't look exactly the way they did in a cinema - it all depends on the way the scan is colour graded. Getting colours right is a really complex issue that I don't know nearly enough about.
Thanks very much! Definitely, the theater experience is its own thing -- you can only approximate it on a computer. Plus, even in the analog film era, colors varied slightly from print to print and changed over the years. Scans raise their own questions.
At the same time, we've compared the existing 35 mm scans of Toy Story to the '90s LaserDisc release, and to the View-Master stills of Toy Story that came out in the '90s. They're all similar in color and texture -- and all very different from the later digital transfers. Early home releases of the Disney renaissance films also resemble the 35 mm copies much more than they do the current versions.
For sure, there's a massive discussion to have about the exact, specific way that Toy Story and the rest were intended to look. This isn't the last word on the subject by any means. We just wanted to bring it up and show the broad-strokes differences, as an intro for folks who aren't familiar with this whole debate from the film-preservation world. We'll leave the final calls to the experts!
Of course - I'm definitely not saying you're mistaken about the difference in look, it's more I wouldn't want people to click on a 35mm scan trailer on youtube and think they're seeing how that print would have looked in cinemas because that depends on the scanner, colour grade, and the monitor. It's definitely possible to guess at how the differences. I am kind of curious if you watched the laserdisks on a CRT monitor because that would presumably be the display technology they were mastered for, but I imagine getting that working is a bit of a hassle these days!
Good points -- it won't be the experience 1:1, even if it's closer. Would be great to see film restoration pros get their hands on the original negatives for these films one day, because there's no chance Disney doesn't have them stashed somewhere. Also, unfortunately, you're right that we don't have a CRT up and running at the moment! We're a bit behind on our old-media setup, even though so much animation hasn't been re-released since VHS or LD. Something we've thought about exploring and probably will need to do, once there's an opportunity.
Yeah. Disney are pretty notorious for revisionist colour grading/Digital Noise Reduction of their analogue films (not to mention occasionally removing problematic elements like in Fantasia) so I imagine the digital films, which would probably be even more complex to identify the original intended look for, would not be particularly authentic. I remember hearing good things about the new Cinderella 4K, I believe, though? I've seen comparisons suggesting that the Fantasia bluray looks significantly different to the original prints. I've actually seen Bambi on a re-release print (i.e. not one from the 40s, probably from the 60s or later as it was not Nitrate) but I've never compared it to the blu-ray. That might be interesting someday! I recall Sleeping Beauty looking a bit too smooth and grainless, even by the standards of Disney blu-rays. But that's a different matter again. For some reason film preservation/restoration philosophy is just one of those things I can think about for ages.
Just had another thought - I wonder if the 35mm trailer scans you so often see look different again to the actual release prints because I suspect they would be more generations removed from the original materials? I wouldn't be surprised if the generation loss maybe made them a little more washed-out or something like that (as well as softer). I guess it depends on whether the source for the trailers was the digital master or film masters. I don't know either way, and I guess it would have depended on the era. But just struck me as something that might be worth looking into.
It's an interesting question. Trailers are also often made well before the film is finalised, and before a final colour grade has been decided on and applied. It could well be that identical scenes in a 35mm trailer looks different to the same scene in the 35mm feature.
I have some matching trailers and features on 35mm, I should have a look at them and compare them.
I also have multiple copies of one film from different labs, I haven't yet compared them but assume they would look visibly different when projected next to each other.
these are really good points, thank you!
As a Pixar insider for over twenty years, any mention/acknowledgement of the photo science group and David D's work makes me very Ghee Happy. Well done, for covering yet another invisible layer in our medium and its eventual delivery.
Thanks very much -- happy to put a spotlight on these folks and their incredible work!
Around the early 90’s I was just getting into lo-fi CGI on an Amiga 2000 that was bringing in some paid work on TV commercials.
Most of this work had to go through a post house, The Mill, in London, then quite new, and my computer would be taxi’d in for them to hot-wire into their digital edit suites to output the best quality to D1 digital video.
I had an idea around then to try and preserve the work on film & so invested in a desktop digital to film settup based around a “Lasergraphics” digital film recorder attached to a custom built 35mm film printer connected to and controlling the Amiga via custom software.
Suffice to say that apart from a few tests I never really got acceptable results since it was virtually impossible outside of the sphere of financially well supported post houses like The Mill or big film studios with deep pockets..:)
The Lasergraphics film recorder was also 3X the cost of the film back so I settled for a second hand Polaroid film recorder intended to image digital to 35mm slide film via a CRT so there was already a huge drop in output quality.
I don’t think even The Mill’s digital to film system around then was based around the Solitaire, at the time the best of its kind, and when you saw ads screened for cinema it really showed, with obvious aliasing and so on.
This is fascinating stuff! Thanks for sharing these stories from the era -- a lot of this is totally new to us. Will have to keep The Mill in mind for the future, as we continue to study early digital animation.
The London post house scene in the late 80’s was interesting since it was really playing catch up with the U.S in terms of access to technology.
It’s worth noting that some CGI landmark work, thanks to the boom in pop videos, resulted in groundbreaking work like the “Money For Nothing” video, made using (I think), a Cubicomp system out of Rushes post production, owned by Virgin.
And…not to blow my own trumpet a little, in the early 80’s one of my first jobs in animation was to assist in the creation of Paul McCartney’s animated “MPL” logo, still in use until today, that was a hybrid of 2D drawn animation & a very basic CGI plotting system and hand rendered animation through Shootsey Studios for director Len Lewis.
This reminds me of some tweets I saw a while back from Jonathan Gibbs (he worked at PDI iirc) around the time of the release of Shrek in UHD. He talked about how it was only rendered at 1828 pixels across because they were made for 35mm film. Also the images were 4:1:1 JPEG compressed at 98% quality to save space. So the film print would help obscure some of those quality issues.
Another wonderful article!!
I love the softness and the muted colors of the 35mm versions. I grew up in an analog world working as a newspaper photographer, developing and printing in primarily black and white in our in-house photo labs, so there is a deep nostalgia for me.
Thank you so much -- very kind! And agreed about the 35 mm ones. There's definitely a place for saturated, sharp, hyper-digital art in the world, but we love the analog look for these films.
Colour reproduction is such a complicated topic! Even with digital media you absolutely can't rely on different display devices having the same primaries, white point, gamma etc etc. and the introduction of 'HDR' standards that aren't being followed properly by manufacturers, and on-by-default TV functions that mess with the saturation, sharpen the image etc. is making it even messier. (I saw a good video a while back comparing all the different versions of The Matrix and discussing the history behind them, I'll have to see if I can find it again.)
You basically can't get even a semblance of consistent colour without either shelling out for a very expensive colour accurate monitor or using a calibrator (typically about £100) to profile your monitor and hope that any given application is colour managed. Even then, you have to hope that the person who created the image was *also* aware of colour spaces and using a calibrated monitor, or else you still won't be seeing what they're seeing.
The additional curse, or perhaps saving grace, is that the human eye is constantly adapting its colour perception anyway, so it may well adjust to different display devices, and much as relative pitch is more important than absolute pitch, the relations between colours may be more important than making sure they look the same on two side by side monitors.
Still... it does seem like we should be able to reproduce the effects of 35mm film with some kind of tonemapping function, and apply the '35mm look' digitally. Kind of baffling that these digital transfers went for such a saturated look if the intended look of the film was on film. Though we treat 'intended look' like it's one definite thing and reality is of course kind of fuzzy...
Thanks for the article, it's really cool to learn about this part of the digital transition!
Thanks for the very thoughtful comment, as always! We've seen the Matrix comparisons ourselves, and they're pretty shocking -- the film got kind of butchered over time. From what we've read, the look of many older live-action movies has radically changed in the past couple of decades, often for the worse.
We're not sure about Disney's reasons for handling the re-releases this way, either. Idris may very well be correct that the movies were reworked on purpose -- it seems likely. Some shots make us wonder, though: did raw digital art get dropped on DVD and streaming, in certain cases?
There are color decisions (like the green of the army men) that feel custom-designed to change when printed. Certain shots in The Lion King almost seem to be missing multiple-exposure tricks that the 35 mm version had, too. It's really strange. The fact that Toy Story's UHD Blu-ray corrects the colors away from the hyper-saturated DVD/streaming versions suggests that something was, in fact, wrong with the earlier ones. But we're not sure what the deal is there.
Anyway, really glad you enjoyed the piece! We've been going down this rabbit hole a while ourselves, and there's definitely more that could be said beyond our brief intro here. Revisiting early computer animation on 35 mm, it looks way different, and has aged far better than a lot people give it credit for!
I'd definitely be keen for more posts along these lines! Early computer animation is such an interesting topic - it would, for instance, be fascinating to find out more about the really early days, stuff like Tron, for instance, and how that has been handled in remasters. If I recall correctly there were multiple effects houses contributing different sequences, which makes me wonder if they might all have been transferred to film in different ways, I don't know. And - although you might already have covered this - I believe that the CG gears in The Great Mouse Detective's clock tower scene were actually transferred to animation paper with a plotter, hand-drawn characters added, and then everything xeroxed and painted like all the other cel animation. That blending of digital and analogue is fascinating to me, kind of like Cannon Fodder (which you have covered).
It's definitely a fascinating thing to research -- will keep this suggestion in mind! That anecdote about Great Mouse Detective is new to us and very cool. Tron may show up in some form in the newsletter, too, because it was influential on some of the people who later became Pixar. We've got our eye on some of Pixar's early shorts, Luxo Jr. especially, for articles in the future.
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I'd say a more saturated look could maybe be explained by in part a desire to appeal to children combined with the infinite flexibility of digital emboldening colour graders to just try stuff they couldn't have done on film and getting to like the look.
Wow, that's really cool. I never really thought about how they had to somehow get their digital images onto physical film. It's just really cool in general that they had to think about how the images would look on film and adjust accordingly. It’s just not something you really think about! There’s so much behind the scenes work that someone on the outside could never even begin to consider. Great work as always!
Thanks so much! We've been growing really interested in this question lately -- how early CG animation was originally targeted at film stock. The look of it is really specific and cool, and something we remember clearly from the '90s and '00s. A subject we intend to keep studying, for sure!
Andreas Deja had some good rants on his blog back in the day about how Disney was deliberately re-grading their films for Blu-Ray/streaming in order to appeal to perceived tastes of the day rather than the artists' original intentions. And I suspect he ought to know ...
Disney's handling of its restored editions has long been pretty controversial -- particularly with the classic catalog. One day, we'd love to watch scans of Pinocchio and Snow White (to name two) that have the seal of approval from film-preservation sticklers.
How is it possibile you're always capable to talk about animation in a nerdy, yet compelling and original perspective? I wish all the topic read on Substack could be dealt in this way.
That's incredibly kind! Thank you so much!
Great article as always! I had seen the comparisons but never knew the digital-film-digital conundrum, I thought they had just oversaturated the colors to justify the blu-ray re-release. You mentioned that with DVDs they could put the digital version of the movie, but do you know how VHS versions compare with the 35mm and digital formats? (Maybe it's the same and I just don't know enough about how VHS works 😅)
Thank you! And the VHS/LaserDisc editions of Toy Story are extremely similar to the 35 mm in color. According to what we've read, it was standard to base home video versions of movies on the 35 mm originals -- just converting them to tape. You can definitely see it when you compare the different releases of Toy Story side by side. The VHS/LD editions of The Lion King (to name one) are also much, much closer to the 35 mm copy than to the later digital transfers.
Ooh, thank you for sharing!! I'm so glad my family has kept some of these, makes me think of a new activity for the holidays: doing side by side comparisons with the streaming versions 🤓
Very interesting, many thanks!
Happy you enjoyed! Thanks very much for the comment.
You forgot to mention that for the 2000 DVD release, the film was actually re-rendered. It is said that the original rendered frames weren't properly archived digitally after they were transferred to film stock, so they re-rendered the movie, and this re-render was used for almost all digital versions since, but some errors were accidentally introduced. In the scene where they first see the mutant toys shortly after Sid ripped the head of Hannah's "Janie" doll and put a pterodactyl's head, the 35mm version (and the 3D version, which was another re-render, one that was VERY difficult) features the Janie doll's body consistently with the correct texture, but for the 2000 dvd and most digital versions since then, in one shot, the doll has the wrong texture (of a tea party doll) instead. Another one was during the scene in which Sid interrogates Woody, on the digital versions since the 2000 re-render (Except for the 3D re-release), there was no motion blur in the scene where Woody freaks out after being burned in the forehead, but the original 35mm version DID have the motion blur for that scene. (remember that the 35mm version was what was released on home media before the 2000 DVD) A lesser known error that was accidentally introduced after it was re-rendered for the 2000 DVD, after "Birthday Guests at 3 O'Clock" and the toys react, we see text flash on Mr. Spell's LCD by mistake, something we do NOT see on the 35mm version. Again, just as I thought, the directly digital version of Toy Story is not an accurate representation of how the film was completed and released in 1995 because that wasn't even a consideration back then, and the filmmakers KNEW that the movie would ultimately be on film (even in the digital versions, negative cutters, color timers, and film processing are all mentioned in the credits. Such credits also remain on later Pixar films even when directly digital was a consideration). I personally prefer 35mm, rather than direct digital, especially for older digitally animated films. While individual prints varied, remember that there were intentional color timing choices in the film as well, said choices were removed for the digital versions.
Absolutely fascinating piece. Thank you so much. Subscribed.
That's very kind -- thank you! So glad you enjoyed.
Do you have any views about the future of the animation medium now with AI encroaching?
I am a journalist and have been investigating AI critically the last few weeks and have grown very concerned on all sorts of issues related to it. I was initially optimistic about AI as making computer animation more accessible to the masses and was hoping to use for my publishing company but now that I have studied it more deeply I have grown so skeptical, particularly on the ethical grounds.
What do you think?
Perhaps a revival of more traditional animation as a backlash? I have been drifting toward more writing by hand again.
GenAI has been the major topic in animation for a few years, and big companies are very much into it. We don't really cover GenAI-powered projects here, as a policy. Beyond the serious ethical problems, we also haven't seen much of anything interesting done with it! The technology is good at outputting cliche, boring and nonspecific art of a type that doesn't appeal to us.
GenAI animation is already getting a ton of traction on YouTube and other video platforms, and it may break into theaters eventually. But people seem to engage with it on a very superficial level -- they may watch it, but it doesn't seem to connect in the way that (for example) an Illumination movie or Glitch series does. And there's a lot of backlash against GenAI animation among fans to boot. How that ultimately develops is still to be seen, but it's something we're keeping an eye on!
Thank you. It’s been helpful talking to others in different fields and getting their perspectives on it. Glad to hear you’re coming to similar conclusions about it.
I feel like I really gave the AI boosters more than a fair day in court to make their case but ultimately the tools just don’t work very well. And because of that, it makes all the ethical issues even more glaring. We’ve grown so accustomed to those debates about tech progress and making trade offs and so on. That doesn’t seem to as be as much of the case here. People across fields are just more and more finding that these programs aren’t living up to the hype.
I really like this article, especially as I study film revision.
I would say that it points to how intentionality when it comes to color grading, especially in the digital era, can be a fickle thing. The way we see our movies is always impacted or mediated by technology - transfer technology, projection technology, delivery formats (eg. DVD, BluRay), etc. And that technology is constantly changing. Thus, what the film looks like evolves with it.
The base or 'source' material/data largely remains the same but the exhibition version's colors are always modified in the transfer process. Directors and colorists then tend to tailor the grade to take the best advantage of the output format. But because outputs can be quite different and have different demands and technical parameters (eg. 35mm print vs. HD LED TV ), the grade of each exhibition version can be quite different in turn
Moreover, the position of the filmmakers over how the film should look today isn't necessarily the same as when it initially came out. And then how we see it further depends on the conditions of exhibition- eg. brightness of the cinema screen or color settings of the 4k TV.
I don't think there is thus necessarily a 'correct' or 'proper' color for many of these works. And as I like to say, there is a paradox when it comes to film preservation in the digital era: to be preserved, a film must remain accessible but to remain accessible, it must be modernized.
Thanks for the kind words and very thoughtful comment! You've made a lot of good points here. Just see the recent dispute about Eyes Wide Shut's colors in the Criterion release -- a lot of people disagree on this stuff, including people who worked on the films!
The place that Toy Story and the '90s Disney movies fall in this debate is a little unusual, since (from what we can gather) the versions on Blu-ray and streaming today aren't just regraded to suit a new format, but are in many cases simply exports of the original data. Comparing different versions of Mulan with screenshots of raw CAPS output, we noticed decisions that were strange in the digital versions but looked great on 35 mm and VHS, like a glaring yellow in the sky that turned into a natural cream color when printed. Effects that look cheap in the digital versions also got polished/hidden on 35 mm and VHS.
You see similar stuff in Toy Story, where the streaming version of the army men is a bright green. As others have mentioned, it doesn't match the color of those toys in real life, like the 35 mm version does. That Ralph Eggleston quote in the piece seems to imply that Pixar made the original, digital colors "wrong" on purpose for the sake of getting the right colors on the physical negative. The 2019 Blu-ray got away from the bright green and went closer to the darker one seen on the 35 mm print, which seems to suggest that the colors seen on streaming were an error all along.
Among film preservation buffs, Disney is pretty infamous for its re-releases of its classic catalog. It wouldn't be shocking if suboptimal decisions got made on some of these digital transfers as well. If nothing else, we'd love to see digital releases of the old films regraded to more closely match the colors that were planned to show up during the analog recording/developing process! Maybe one day.
You’re welcome and thank you for the response! I can certainly see more transfers and re-grades from the original data happening down the line, which will be raise more questions as we move into the realm of 8k remastering and even higher definition streaming.
Enjoyable read. Interesting to think which version is the most faithful to the original. Definitely something gained with the transfer to analogue, where limitations led to a positive outcome!
When making digital art/compositing in photoshop, adding grain and some roughness to the final product is a technique used to unify all the elements and soften everything into a more cohesive look
Thank you! And that's a really good point about Photoshop -- while working on this article, we had a similar thought about the use of texture overlays to bring the elements of a digital image together. You definitely feel a gap when it's removed in those Disney and Pixar films.