July 30 - Flowers and Trees

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On this day, in 1932, the Walt Disney Studio released its 29^th short in the Silly Symphonies series, Flowers and Trees, and the first film to be released in glorious three-color Technicolor. When moving pictures began flitting across screens in 1895, they lacked two things that we take for granted today: color and sound. A lot of hoopla surrounded the first time synchronized sound complimented  the images of The Jazz Singer in 1927, but most people would be hard pressed to tell you that the first movie in color debuted a decade earlier (or that the company that developed it was French).

In 1917, the Thomson Multimedia company developed a camera that could film in color. A prism was used to split the image onto two strips of simultaneously recording film, one image that passed through a red filter and the other through a green filter. During playback, both film strips would be projected onto the screen at the same time, from two different openings in the projector, using more filters and prisms to combine the image. The main problem with this method is that the guy running the projector had to be constantly adjusting the focus of not one but two films to keep the whole thing from looking like a blurry mess. Needless to say, there was only ever one movie produced with this color technique, The Gulf Between, and it was basically used to see if theaters would be interested in the new technology called Technicolor. Since it required highly skilled projectionists, the answer was no.

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Five years later, Thomson unveiled an improved technique. Again a prism split the image onto two strips of film through red and green filters but now the film was treated during the printing process, putting the color actually into the print itself. The filters and prism could be removed from the projector and no one needed a PhD to run the thing. Major problems still existed though. The red and green prints, instead of running on separate reels like before, were glued together and ran on one reel. The heat from the light in the projector caused the film to warp and new prints had to be constantly made to compensate. Only a handful of movies in the early to mid-Twenties were produced using technique number two.

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In 1928, Thompson finally got most of Technicolor’s problems fixed by introducing a third technique. Filming stuff stayed the same with the prisms and filters and two strips of film. But now the prints went through a dying process that put all the colors onto one strip of film, eliminating the need to glue two strips together. Starting with 1928’s The Viking (which was released over year after The Jazz Singer, making it seem like sound came first) Hollywood began to get into the color groove, releasing two dozen color movies over the next two years. The trend would probably have completely taken over at that point except for the one thing that could stop it dead in its tracks: the Great Depression. As money began to get tight everywhere in America, including Tinsel Town, color, which cost a lot more than plain old black and white, became a luxury studios could no longer afford.

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None of which stopped Thompson from tinkering with Technicolor. Just a few years after perfecting their two strip process, they developed a three strip process. in addition to the red and green filters, they added another strip of film that was recorded through a blue filter. The eye-popping color that the new technique produced was more saturated, more vibrant and just more of everything compared to what had come before. Unfortunately, because of everyone's money woes, Thompson couldn't get anyone to give it a whirl. Until, that is, one of their salesmen caught Walt Disney on a good day.

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Walt decided to give Technicolor 4.0 a try for two reasons. First, he was always interested in new technology and eager to see how it could be used to make better quality product. From sound to television, he didn't have to suffer too much convincing before giving in. The biggest reason this time around, though, was that he needed something to boost the Silly Symphonies. They simply weren't as popular as Mickey Mouse cartoons even though they were a fertile place to incubate new kinds of animation and storytelling. Maybe, just maybe, color would be the thing to push them over the edge. And Flowers and Trees seemed to be a perfect vehicle to test that theory.

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Work had already begun on Flowers and Trees in black and white. All of that was scrapped and the process began again in Technicolor. Because it was inherently more expensive to have color than not, and because of all the previous work that ended up on the trash heap, the short ran wildly over budget, threatening to ruin to studio (a refrain that was heard quite often when Walt was involved in something). But in the end, it was all worth it (as it usually was when Walt was involved in something). Flowers and Trees was both a commercial and critical success. The beautiful colors combined with the whimsical yet dramatic plot continued to wow audiences until the studio had made its money back plus a generous amount more. When Oscar time rolled around, Flowers and Trees would be honored with the very first Academy Award for Best Animated Short (and the first competitive Oscar for the studio). 

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The Technicolor experiment worked so well that every Silly Symphony from that point on was produced in color (Mickey cartoons were popular enough they didn't warrant color until 1935's The Band Concert). One aspect of the experiment that showed Walt was becoming a better businessman (entirely due to the fact that Roy handled the business end of everything, of course) is that when Disney agreed to use three-strip Technicolor, they sign an exclusive contract for its use for three years. When Flowers and Trees made every other color animation look dull by comparison, the other studios really didn't have any way to fix that until the end of 1935. They all had to make do with two-strip Technicolor or other, even more inferior processes. And having that competitive edge for three years is what gave the Walt Disney Studio the financial stability to try other experiments later on, like feature length animation.