Colored Outlines-Why use them? When are they necessary, and how to use them.

Starting with the premiere of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARVES at the Carthay Circle theatre in December 21 1937, there came a new normal for traditional cel animation: Colored outlines.

Kind of hard to tell without upping the brightness but the dwarves do have Colored Outlines.

This was a push by Walt Disney to differentiate the animation from his shorts to the film.

In fact, this was thought to be unique to Disney until Fleischer studios decided to do the same for their 1939 adaption of Gulliver's Travels.

Eventually, the technique was adopted by other studios, aside from Warner Bros.

So what's colored outlines? 

It's to give a new feel to the character cels. You may notice in alot of you favorite cartoons that many characters are given black outlines. It's to help provide a minor silhouette and figure to your character.

The characters are drawn on paper first as shown here with this girl.

But of course, since we live in a time where color is required for presentation, we color inside the outlines.

Either on the back of the cel...

Or through the paint bucket tool on your favorite animation software like Toon Boom.

(As long as the outline is a Vector line. Raster lines get screwed up due to antialiasing.)

But there comes a point in which black outlines aren't enough. So that's where Colored Outlines come into play.

Sometimes, the use of colored outlines can range from partial....

Roxie from John K's unproduced HEARTACHES is a perfect example of partial colored outlines. Everything in her cel is black outlines except her hair.

To full colored outlines.

Both Lilo and Stitch here use colored outlines.

The above is just a lithograph cel as LILO & STITCH uses all digital cels throughout the movie.

Perhaps I should demonstrate how colored outlines are created in cartoons using my own artwork.

Here we have my own artwork in it's non-colored but inked form before the process of coloring the outlines.

Now let’s compare that the same cel from above, only this time, it’s in color.

As you can see, we have color but the one thing that's left unchanged were the outlines. They're still black.

I wish I could change all that but for some reason, my paint program of choice is behaving odd for some reason. NO IT'S NOT THE GODDAMN GENERATIVE A.I TOOLS. 

It's the just the traditional, can't color the outlines without that stupid anti-aliasing thing going on. I'm posting these through another computer because I don't always have access to my Custom Built PC but I can't use a brush tool using a mouse since my wrist is so accustomed to a Wacom Stylus so instead, I'm going to show you another cel I made but this time with colored outlines.

Kind of the same drawing as the rough from earlier but still uses colored outlines.

And lookie here, I've got a cel from my own collection that actually has the color codes, markers, etc.

I also had different shades here to differentiate light source colors.

You may notice in alot of the cels of your favorite Disney movies or others that the outlines use a much darker palette than the main colors. The reason for this is not only because the color artist anticipates the color inside the outline but also the darker and lighter shades used for light sources.

Sometimes, the light source shade colors can be straight up solid shades like this scene from THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER...

To actual blur shaded colors as seen in this scene of Genie from ALADDIN.

However, keep in mind the blur shadow shading can only be accomplished via the computer.

I will preface by saying that the colored outlines is not a computer thing. Movies back in the day before xerox came around did colored outlines because those cels were hand inked.

However, once Xerox became the norm for animation, the ability to do colored outlines was lost because back then, ink toners couldn't do colored outlines... I mean, they could but the you have to understand that this was the 1960's and Xerox toners for color were still very expensive and I have a hunch the lithographic plates that were originally used before laser printing weren't all that reliable.

And although it was advertised that films like THE RESCUERS from 1977 brought back colored outlines, in my opinion, that's a straight up lie.

I've seen this film so many times on Blu-Ray that to say RESCUERS cels haven't aged well is an overstatement. 

Yes it looks a bit overly sketchy and rough but the fault is due to the gray toners used for most of the cels. 

Perfect for mice like Ms. Bianca but not well suited for humans such as Madame Medusa.

The colored cels were still pushed by Disney into the 1980s when they switched to a new method for Xerography called APT. That's automatic photo transfer for short. 

It's still lithographic but from what I read about this process, it allowed better control of the cels and colored outlines(Probably reduced opacity on the outlines) via photography and sheet film.

The cel of Vanessa from Little Mermaid is an example of sheet film cel transfer.

But by the time of The Rescuers Down Under, the old process became old hat so after the drawings were cleaned up, they were scanned into the computer and digitally colored

Is it just me, or are the digitally colored cels in Rescuers Down Under filtered? 

Of course, that was just Disney, Hanna-Barbera, and Ren & Stimpy.
The rest of the industry for the majority of the 1990s refused to switch to computer coloring due to preferring the aesthetics of hand painted xeroxed cels.

And yes, this includes anime. Of all the anime that I've seen that was released in the 90s, none of them used computers for animation, aside from opening sequences, color correction, and synchronizing English Dub dialogue with an external piece of software

I'm looking at you Ranma. You never used computers, except when Ocean Studios had to synchronize Sarah Strange and Venus Terzo's dialogue to your mouth flaps using WORDFIT.

I will have to say that until today's standards for 2D animation mandated vector outlines, the colored outlines used in Disney movies and a few Warner Bros. films did not use smooth outlines.

If you freeze frame at a particular camera zoom on movies such as Aladdin, especially when the z-axis camera zooms into the cel, you may notice the cel is still as rough of a pencil line as the old style xerox cels were. It's just that they were colored using the paint bucket tool.

Emperor's New Groove however is the closest to have the camera zoom that close to the cel but not only that so that you can marvel at the scratchy pencil lead but also in full motion and longer periods of time. And at Yzma's teeth of all things.

How long has that been in there indeed. 

Honestly, I was paying more attention to the scratchy pencil lead outlines than at the spinach.

Hoo boy, was this an arduous post. It was supposed to be an easy one but sourcing images was a nightmare for me.

Well, what the hell. I have to be committed to making these animation blog posts so yeah.

Next, I'll talk about other topics such as Digital Ink and Paint, sound design, CG, etc.