Trollheart

Two-color Technicolor

Process 1

Technicolor originally existed in a two-color (red and green) system. In Process 1 (1916), a prism beam-splitter behind the camera lens exposed two consecutive frames of a single strip of black-and-white negative film simultaneously, one behind a red filter, the other behind a green filter. Because two frames were being exposed at the same time, the film had to be photographed and projected at twice the normal speed. Exhibition required a special projector with two apertures (one with a red filter and the other with a green filter), two lenses, and an adjustable prism that aligned the two images on the screen.

The results were first demonstrated to members of the American Institute of Mining Engineers in New York on February 21, 1917.[10] Technicolor itself produced the only movie made in Process 1, The Gulf Between, which had a limited tour of Eastern cities, beginning with Boston and New York on September 13, 1917, primarily to interest motion picture producers and exhibitors in color.[11] The near-constant need for a technician to adjust the projection alignment doomed this additive color process. Only a few frames of The Gulf Between, showing star Grace Darmond, are known to exist today.

Process 2

Convinced that there was no future in additive color processes, Comstock, Wescott, and Kalmus focused their attention on subtractive color processes. This culminated in what would eventually be known as Process 2 (1922) (often referred to today by the misnomer "two-strip Technicolor"). As before, the special Technicolor camera used a beam-splitter that simultaneously exposed two consecutive frames of a single strip of black-and-white film, one behind a green filter and one behind a red filter.

The difference was that the two-component negative was now used to produce a subtractive color print. Because the colors were physically present in the print, no special projection equipment was required and the correct registration of the two images did not depend on the skill of the projectionist.
The frames exposed behind the green filter were printed on one strip of black-and-white film, and the frames exposed behind the red filter were printed on another strip. After development, each print was toned to a color nearly complementary to that of the filter: orange-red for the green-filtered images, cyan-green for the red-filtered ones. Unlike tinting, which adds a uniform veil of color to the entire image, toning chemically replaces the black-and-white silver image with transparent coloring matter, so that the highlights remain clear (or nearly so), dark areas are strongly colored, and intermediate tones are colored proportionally.

The two prints, made on film stock half the thickness of regular film, were then cemented together back to back to create a projection print. The Toll of the Sea, which debuted on November 26, 1922, used Process 2 and was the first general-release film in Technicolor.

Although successful commercially, Process 2 was plagued with technical problems. Because the images on the two sides of the print were not in the same plane, both could not be perfectly in focus at the same time. The significance of this depended on the depth of focus of the projection optics. Much more serious was a problem with cupping. Films in general tended to become somewhat cupped after repeated use: every time a film was projected, each frame in turn was heated by the intense light in the projection gate, causing it to bulge slightly; after it had passed through the gate, it cooled and the bulge subsided, but not quite completely.

It was found that the cemented prints were not only very prone to cupping, but that the direction of cupping would suddenly and randomly change from back to front or vice versa, so that even the most attentive projectionist could not prevent the image from temporarily popping out of focus whenever the cupping direction changed. Technicolor had to supply new prints so the cupped ones could be shipped to their Boston laboratory for flattening, after which they could be put back into service, at least for a while.

The presence of image layers on both surfaces made the prints especially vulnerable to scratching, and because the scratches were vividly colored they were very noticeable. Splicing a Process 2 print without special attention to its unusual laminated construction was apt to result in a weak splice that would fail as it passed through the projector. Even before these problems became apparent, Technicolor regarded this cemented print approach as a stopgap and was already at work developing an improved process.

Process 3

Based on the same dye-transfer technique first applied to motion pictures in 1916 by Max Handschiegl, Technicolor Process 3 (1928) was developed to eliminate the projection print made of double-cemented prints in favor of a print created by dye imbibition. The Technicolor camera for Process 3 was identical to that for Process 2, simultaneously photographing two consecutive frames of a black-and-white film behind red and green filters.

In the lab, skip-frame printing was used to sort the alternating color-record frames on the camera negative into two series of contiguous frames, the red-filtered frames being printed onto one strip of specially prepared "matrix" film and the green-filtered frames onto another. After processing, the gelatin of the matrix film's emulsion was left proportionally hardened, being hardest and least soluble where it had been most strongly exposed to light. The unhardened fraction was then washed away. The result was two strips of relief images consisting of hardened gelatin, thickest in the areas corresponding to the clearest, least-exposed areas of the negative.

To make each final color print, the matrix films were soaked in dye baths of colors nominally complementary to those of the camera filters: the strip made from red-filtered frames was dyed cyan-green and the strip made from green-filtered frames was dyed orange-red. The thicker the gelatin in each area of a frame, the more dye it absorbed. Each matrix in turn was pressed into contact with a plain gelatin-coated strip of film known as the "blank" and the gelatin "imbibed" the dye from the matrix. A mordant made from deacetylated chitin was applied to the blank before printing, to prevent the dyes from migrating or "bleeding" after they were absorbed.

Dye imbibition was not suitable for printing optical soundtracks, which required very high resolution, so when making prints for sound-on-film systems the "blank" film was a conventional black-and-white film stock on which the soundtrack, as well as frame lines, had been printed in the ordinary way prior to the dye transfer operation.

Okay, so now you know. Or don't. I'm still confused. On we go.

The first of Ising and Harman’s Happy Harmonies to feature anthropomorphic (you know what? I’m getting tired of writing that word: let’s just call them anthros from now on, okay?) animals seems to have been When the Cat’s Away (1935), which also happens to be in colour. The cat here, perhaps going against the later trend, is a female one and is lured away from the fire and out of the house by the amorous attentions of a tom, leading also perhaps to the first instances of cats singing onscreen in a cartoon? Possibly. The mouse then emerges, with a nod (intended or not I don't’ know) to Alice in Wonderland, from the tea pot and goes exploring, now that, well, the cat’s away. He locks the cat out and then goes back into the mousehole to invite all his friends out. It’s interesting that he is the only one you could call an anthro, with a voice and wearing denim dungarees, and using his “hands”, while the rest are, well, just mice, there to make up the numbers and I guess it was easy for the boys to just draw standard mice.

The title of the film is literal: within a minute of its start the cat is gone from the cartoon, and the mice are running the show. It’s hard not to see the hand of Disney here, as the boys have the mouse turn on the cooker and the pots and kettles thereon begin singing and dancing, in a fashion very reminiscent of the whistles in Steamboat Willie. The cartoon also uses - maybe for the first time, but I sort of doubt it - the idea of “drunken music”. You know the kind of thing: someone gets pissed and starts staggering around and you have a violin played slowly and somewhat with a warp in the tune to make it sound like the instrument, or player, is drunk. I suppose the idea of mice getting (hah) rat-arsed would be frowned upon today, and no doubt the likes of the Temperance Society had much to say about such shenanigans, but then, these aren’t people but animals, so maybe they were told where to stick their high-minded concerns and comments, if they had them.

Then, as would happen in many cartoons down the decades, there is conflict as the bad guy, a big muscly rat who bears something of a passing resemblance, I feel, to Popeye’s nemesis, Brutus or Bluto, enters the fray and tries to steal the mouse’s girl away. Unable to beat him on his own terms, the mouse uses guile: he jumps up to the window and lets the cat back in, who then chases the rat back into his hole. Cute.

I want to see if I can see an appreciable difference between two and three-strip technicolor, and luckily I can here, as this cartoon was in two-strip, but after May of 1935 MGM changed to the more popular and upgraded three-strip, like in The Old Mill Pond (1936). And yes, right away I can see we now have blues and greens, which we didn’t in the other cartoon. It’s almost like looking at an old sepia photograph compared to a modern monochrome one. Not quite colour yet (though this is, but you know what I mean) but far sharper and clearer than the previous. This system, more than the other, deserves the epithet of technicolor. It’s interesting that the frogs sing in chorus here, making me wonder whether Paul McCartney knew of or saw this cartoon before penning “We All Stand Together”? If not, it’s another weird coincidence. Let me see if it says anything about it on Wiki. No, according to that, the song is based on a Rupert the Bear movie from 1983. Well, coincidence certainly, unless the makers of the movie are just not admitting their influence, or it’s not spoken of there.

Again, the racism. These frogs are very definitely meant to be black people - the mannerisms, the walk, the dance, the music, the speech, the exaggerated lips and pure-white teeth. It doesn’t say who does the voices, but I’m willing to bet at this point they are white, despite the fact that black artists such as Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway are all, um, caricatured, it says here. Yeah it’s basically a musical performance. The animation is excellent all right, but there’s not a lot to write about. Another three-strip is To Spring (1936) which seems to concern some sort of hibernation ending, though the creatures look like gnomes or goblins or something - they are basic humanoid but have large pointed ears - who have been sleeping through the winter.

The animation here is first-class, especially the passage of a droplet of water down several levels of a cave, till it hits the windmill arm of a cuckoo clock. I also like that when the main character wakes up and gets out of bed, his leg is asleep. Such attention to detail marks this cartoon out as particularly special. Whatever these creatures are, they appear to be trying to engineer the return of spring, like workers in a nature factory or something. It’s very well put together and the animation is very smooth. It also features something Disney would do a lot, which is to focus on one other, ancillary character, who is performing some act, and to keep cutting back to that character. Here, one of the little guys is trying, without success, to put his trousers on, and every time we go back to him he is still trying. The fairies, or whatever they are, battle a white ghostly figure - presumably meant to represent winter - and though they are at first repulsed they work together and beat him, allowing spring to come forth.

Warners however turned out to be the true powerhouse of American animation, and with future legends such as Tex Avery, Friz Freleng and the “man of a thousand voices”, Mel Blanc, new characters began to pop up, the likes of which we still recognise today and who formed, at least for me, a major part of my growing up. The first new face was Beans the Cat, quickly superseded by Porky the Pig, both of whom debuted in the Merrie Melodies short I Haven’t Got a Hat (1935).

I’m confused about this one. It says it’s in colour (and being 1935 you would expect it to be, at this stage) yet the only full video I can find on YouTube has it in black-and-white, and not only that, a sort of storyboard idea. There are colour clips, but they range from a few seconds to just over a minute. I can get the story from the b/w one but I can’t comment really on the animation unless I can see the full colour video, which I can’t, and this is a pity, as, like I say above, this is the debut of Porky Pig. Anyway, let’s see what we got. Well actually I have one here in colour that’s almost two and a half minutes long - that’s about a third of the actual film, not bad - but I think I have to say the colour is not as good as in, say, To Spring or even The Old Mill Pond. It looks a little washed out.


Another thing that would become standard in cartoons is here, baby animals following their mother in lines, especially ducks (and of course one goes astray) and it’s also clever how the teacher, a cow, uses her cowbell to ring for the class. I rather expected the stammer would be added later to Porky Pig, but no, it’s here, although a little perhaps too pronounced, making it all but impossible to make out what he’s saying. In later incarnations he would just stutter over a few words, but here it’s almost every word. Beans the Cat is just a poor copy of Bosko; doesn’t even look anything like a cat. The full film is below, in that weird sketchy black and white I spoke of.


The basic idea of a school talent show is a good one, gives the animators a lot of scope. A haughty owl plays a piano, two sheep sing the song “I Haven’t Got a Hat” (in case, like me, you were wondering where the title came from) and a very embarrassed and shy, um, something, hard to see in the sketch, recites Mary Had a Little Lamb. In the end of course, it all ends up in a schoolkid scuffle and fight, led by Beans the cat. Porky has just the one role in the cartoon and then is not seen afterwards, though he does take up the major part of it.

Another trope to be taken up is the idea of someone’s voice speeding up to the point where it is virtually unintelligible, something we as kids used to do with records, to riotous laughter. Ah, ye had to be there.

Ah right, I see this is a two-strip technicolor cartoon, which accounts for the washed-out look. Apparently Disney had the rights on the three-colour one until the autumn (fall) of 1935, and this was released in March. Interestingly, at the end it’s not Porky who says “That’s all folks” but a sort of jester figure, and of course the stammer at the beginning is yet to come.

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