Why are older cels black and white?

[Caroline]

okay, being an artist working in the animation biz, i am a little embarrassed to ask this... but i couldnt find any info about it online. also, i was never educated on the subject of animation film history. so please bare with me if its a stupid question.:

why are older animation cels painted black and white, and not in color?

i understand that the world did not start to see animation in color until the 1930s (to my knowledge). actually, while some studios like disney began producing color cartoons, other studios were still producing in black and white. however, i dont see why the use of color was limited just because of the availability of color film. why paint the cels in black and white? why not paint the cels in color, and just film them in black and white? is it because they look better? is there a difference visually?

are there any film people, or animation people, who have the answer?

i have had this on my mind for a while... thanks!

[Keropi]

why paint the cels in black and white? why not paint the cels in color, and just film them in black and white? is it because they look better? is there a difference visually?

There is a difference visually. Most people can't visualize how colored items look in black and white.

Maybe it was just easier for them to get exactly the look they wanted from painting in black and white. What you see is what you get. In black and white movies they had to adjust the characters wardrobes/scenery to match the look they wanted in black and white. Lots of shades of black, white and gray clash with each other in black and white film.

Was black and white film cheaper than color also? I don't know.

[JWR]

The main reason was when the early animation was in black & white was that that was how the TV's of the time broadcast in. The last daytime B&W tv broadcast was in 1967 and a lot of the early animation was made in the 50's & 60's.

I do remember watching Astro boy & Kimba the white lion in B&W while I was in elementary school.

[Caroline]

this seems to make sense to me, although i cannot imagine it being easier to visualize the final product by painting in b/w. i have worked on a series that uses a monochrome pallette, and it is much more challenging to work that way than with a full range of color. the color seperation is very tricky and you need a great sense of color to get it to look right.

as for kimba, i used to own cels from the original series that was aired in black and white, and those cels were painted in color. in fact, kimba was the first animation series to ever be broadcast in color in japan. walt disney sent artists to the tezuka studios to train them in color animation. i do know that the original astro boy cels were painted in black and white.

i guess what i am asking is if the reason for painting in b/w is due to some sort of advantages it may have had?

[klet]

Was black and white film cheaper than color also? I don't know.

Yes. It was newer, and not everyone used it. Less supply, growing demand, higher prices.

Now, here's a question for you: is it cheaper to paint in black and white? I mean, all greys can be obtained by mixing black and white, which can be done in studio. So, of course, you only have to buy two colors. With color, I imagine that you would at least have to buy the primary colors, black, and white. All others can be obtained by mixing (not that any studios worked this way). So, fewer colors might have been cheaper, and before the advant of color film, more practical. Why take the time to paint in color if no one is going to see it that way?

When color film became more readily available, I'd imagine that a lot of studios stuck with b&w for a while because they didn't have people trained to paint in color. You said it yourself:

in fact, kimba was the first animation series to ever be broadcast in color in japan. walt disney sent artists to the tezuka studios to train them in color animation.

I think the real question is why studios began painting in black and white to begin with. I honestly think it probably has to do with cost and difficulty. It might be easier to paint in color, but if you've got 14 colors on a cel as opposed to a mixture of greys, you've got a lot more places you can screw up.

I can check at my uni's library to see if they have any animation history books.

[irmgaard]

I'm reminded of something I read that backs up klet's cost theory.

The early Tezuka cartoon, Dororo, had a pilot with cels painted in color, but the series cels were painted in Black & White.

If you go to the official Tezuka Osamu web site:

http://en.tezuka.co.jp/anime/sakuhin/ts/ts010.html

Scroll down to the Story/Explanation paragraph, and they theorize that this was due to "tight budget."

[Caroline]

I honestly think it probably has to do with cost and difficulty. It might be easier to paint in color, but if you've got 14 colors on a cel as opposed to a mixture of greys, you've got a lot more places you can screw up.

i would believe that. the animation business is a numbers game. in the end, the way things are done usually revolves around how cost efficient it is. maybe for some studios, it had nothing to do with visual appeal. this might explain the reason why some studios were still painting their cels in b/w while others were not. klet, if you can find anything in those books, let me know. id love the real answer.

[klet]

I didn't forget about this! It's just nearly impossible to find this information. Most of the books on non-computer animation are old, and some don't even have indexes. They also have cute, inventive titles for their chapters, making it near impossible to figure out what the chapter's actually about. There's a lot more info. out there about the early pioneers and the strange ways that they animate than there is about the actual process before cels were made in color.

The main reason was when the early animation was in black & white was that that was how the TV's of the time broadcast in. The last daytime B&W tv broadcast was in 1967 and a lot of the early animation was made in the 50's & 60's.

Actually, that's completely incorrect. The "golden age" of animation apparently started in the 30's. Snow White (which used colored cels) first came to the theatres in 1937. So, there was a medium for color animation--the theatre. Animation from the "golden age" was all broadcast in the theatre, most as small shorts after a movie.

Apparently, as early as the 20's, cartoons were being shown in color. However, the film itself was not filmed in color; it was dyed afterwards. The books I read did not make it clear whether the cels were painted in color or not.

"The film emulsion, being gelatin, could easily be dyed by immersing the film in a vat. Color films were unstable and the colors had a habit of vanishing overnight but a workable color was developed in 1929 and several musicals were filmed using early Technicolor and Cinecolor" (Heraldson 42).

The first color cartoon was done by Winsor McCay; he colored one print of his first cartoon, Little Nemo, for one of his live vaudeville acts in 1912 (Smith 5). This cartoon was done on rice paper.

The only time I found a mention of color paint and cels, is from "the point in time in cartoon history when color suddenly became inseparable to cartoons . . . . Some cameramen, placing a colored (opaqued) cel on the background and then filming it found they could not remove the cel--it had stuck to the background. Drying and stability were teh main problems. Studios tried many colors, lacquers, and oil and tempera but none served adequately. Also some colors would become brittle and separate from the acetate surface of the cel when dry. The studios thus compounded their own celluloid-adhering colors" (Heraldson 132).

Considering how some of the earliest animation was on stuff like rice paper, there was no color involved. They had to draw everything for each frame, including the backgrounds. Also, looking at how much trouble color gave them when it became a neccesity, I imagine that if they ran into that trouble to begin with, they just decided to skip the color process. After all, they could color the film itself much easier for the theatre productions, and it did not matter, like JWR said, for the TV ones.



Other random, interesting facts I learned:

Some of the earliest animation included filming images on a chalkboard. Pieces of the image would be erased and redrawn to show movement.

Another early animation was done with crude stickmen by a Frenchman who could not draw. Many people in France consider him the creator of animation even though other people in different countries had done stuff before him.

Disney's 100 Dalmations was the first cartoon in the US (and possibly the first ever) to use the Xerox form of transfering cel lines rather than having them hand-inked.


The books/articles:

Heraldson, Donald. Creators of Life: A History of Animation. Drake Publishers: New York, 1975.

Smith, Conrad. "The Early History of Animation." The American Animated Cartoon. Eds. Danny Peary and Gerald Peary. E.P. Dutton: New York, 1980. 3-13.

[Caroline]

wow, as early as the 20s, i did not know that. i knew we had colored cel animation in the 30s. very cool.

klet- thank you so much for taking the initiave to look all of this up. i'll have to do the same very soon because i find this a really interesting topic.

[backlotanimation]

Hello all,

Quote-
"(JWR wrote:
The main reason was when the early animation was in black & white was that that was how the TV's of the time broadcast in. The last daytime B&W tv broadcast was in 1967 and a lot of the early animation was made in the 50's & 60's.
Actually, that's completely incorrect. The "golden age" of animation apparently started in the 30's. Snow White (which used colored cels) first came to the theatres in 1937. So, there was a medium for color animation--the theatre. Animation from the "golden age" was all broadcast in the theatre, most as small shorts after a movie.) "

Klet,
JWR is half right, In the 50s when TV first started to reach more than a few markets the owners put color shows on there Black and white stations, and alot of things went wrong like colors not showing up or bleeding or even showing up as black spots, lines, dots ect. ect.
Alot of cartoons were redrawn and recolored to black and white so the shades looked right on the new TV's of the day, Note most of the first tv's had 1/100 the resolution of even the cheapest tv's of today.
Most animation owes it's dues to artists from the mid 1850s to 1860s and true animation like we know today did not start until 1928, before that it was called a graphic narrative like the lightning sketches and many other ways of telling a story with pictures that did not move but were hand drawn to tell the story as it was told.
Klet it's sad to say but most of the books on animation only tell part of the story of animations start.
From the 1850s onword folks tried lots of ways to make drawings move to tell a story and this was done in alot of places all over the world, It's hard to say who did it first but some forms of animation have been around for over 5000 years, Tombs in Egypt had forms of animation in them, It looked like a stick with a disk on it with a bird on one side and a cage on the other and when you spin the stick the bird looks like it is in the cage.
So animation or the idea of it has been around for a long time but it took the age of film to come into it's own.
The main reason most studios used black and white was that Disney bought the rights to the 3 color process and would not let the rights be sold until he had made his money back on the color upgrades to his studio and the contract he had ran out, after that more studios moved to the color process but some stayed old school to save cash.
The xerox process was invented by one of Disneys friends that worked with him from the start at his studios, Xerox was made just to transfer drawings to cels to be colored, It saved Disney tons of time redrawing pictures onto cels.

I would tell you one of the best books on the subject is called '7 minutes, The life and death of the American animated cartoon' By Norman M. Klein
http://backlotanimation.rubberslug.com/ ... mID=108265
Check that book out and it will give you all the answers you are looking for, I have read over 200+ books on the subject of animation and this one book tells it all.
It talks about stuff from all over the world and times new and old.

I hope this helps you out some, Come back and let me know what you think of the book it will open your eyes to all the stuff it took to get to where we are today, The part on the show Roger Rabbit will scare the heck out of you well maybe not scare, but it will show you things you never heard before, It opened my eyes!

Roy (DBA) Backlotanimation