The Little Mermaid's Color-Grading Shipwreck

Inside the witchcraft that makes all movies look the same

Newly-released stills from The Little Mermaid live-action reboot have drawn virtually unanimous criticism for their drab, putty-colored appearance. Who’s the villain behind this very un-Disney-like crayon box? The largely unknown and generally misunderstood process of color grading is the obvious culprit, but lurking behind the scenes are the Hollywood executives who steal creative freedom from filmmakers.

Citzen Kane (1941)

In the early days of film, there was no color, so there was no need for color grading. Cinematographers like Greg Toland (Citizen Kane) and Joseph Ruttenberg (winner of four Academy Awards for cinematography) were masters of their craft; as long as the black & white film they shot was processed properly, the resulting images were rich with tones, full of detail and depth.

An American in Paris (1951)

With the invention of Kodak’s three-strip Technicolor film in 1932, the need to make adjustments to the colors in a motion picture immediately became clear. Film responded differently to different light sources: daylight made things look blue, and interior lights made things look yellow. To make the final image appear natural and pleasing to the eye, those unnatural casts had to be removed. At first, this process was extremely laborious. Technicolor used three separate “inter-negatives” - separate strips of film (one for red, one for green, and one for blue) - which were individually processed and then combined into one full-color composite. Because this required colorists to vary the amount of time each inter-negative was exposed, the process was called “color timing.”

For decades, the Hazeltine Color Analyzer was industry standard for color timing.

Movie technology became more sophisticated over time. Technicolor went the way of the dodo, and as cinema film stocks became more robust, the machines used for color timing became capable of more sophisticated manipulation. In the early 1990s, the editing process started to become computerized, but the early systems were just intended to replace the laborious process of cutting and splicing film; color timing was still done on film, in dedicated labs.

All that started to change in the mid 1990s. More powerful software let Hollywood colorists easily adjust not only the overall color in a scene, but individual colors. Although industry insiders continued to use the term “timing,” the British term “grading” gradually took over, as a shorthand way to differentiate the new, digital techniques from the old, analog ones.

Bill Warner demonstrating the AVID-1 editing system.

Initially, filmmakers and cinematographers embraced color grading as a way to emphasize the mood of a scene, and to make their projects look distinctive. Color choice had always been an important part of production design (the aspect of filmmaking that deals with sets, wardrobe, props, etc.), but now reality itself could be altered to suit a filmmaker’s taste. A pale blue sky could be dialed up to a cheerful, bright cerulean for a romantic comedy, or turned down to a foreboding, gunmetal grey for a horror movie.

Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman in David Fincher’s Se7en (1995)

For a few years, filmmakers experimented happily with the opportunities afforded by digital color grading. If you look at movies from the late ’90s and early 2000s, you’ll notice that they generally look quite different from each other. David Fincher - now semi-notorious for his digitally-exaggerated use of bleak and monochromatic color - was one of the first directors to recognize the potential of this new technology, and his 1995 thriller Se7en, caused a bit of a stir for using color grading in a noticeable way.

Then, Hollywood did what Hollywood does best: it homogenized. Studio bean-counters looked at the color grading of the most profitable films, and pressured editors and colorists to do the same thing to everything. In film circles, this is known as the “teal and orange” era.

Every genre, but two colors to rule them all.

The theory is simple: teal and orange are complementary colors - that is, they are opposite each other on the color wheel. When complementary colors are juxtaposed, our eyes perceive a strong contrast. If you’re marketing a movie, you want it to be as eye-catching as possible, and color contrast is a reliable crutch to lean on.

Of course, when everyone does the same thing, it stops being effective. Which brings us to The Little Mermaid, and its ill-advised tonal palette. After 15 years of visually assaulting audiences with bright orange skin and Smurf-blue backgrounds, Hollywood decided that filmmakers should mix it up a little bit. Of course, in La-La Land, this means “everyone suddenly change to the new thing.” The new thing, in color grading, was the opposite extreme: Fincher-esque, dark, desaturated colors.

Just as every movie, regardless of theme, had been shoe-horned into a teal and orange color scheme, every movie now is restricted to a dingy, limited palette that looks a bit like the actual colors were left outside to be bleached by the sun, and are now being viewed through a moldy shower curtain. Audiences, understandably, are confused. They know they don’t like what they’re seeing, but they’re not exactly sure why it looks that way.

The answer, in a word, is the Hollywood machine. Don’t fault the filmmakers or the production designers - if you walked onto the set of The Little Mermaid, the actual sets, costumes, and lighting probably looked amazing. You can’t even blame the editors and colorists: their hands are tied. It’s the studio executives - cowardly leeches with zero regard for either the art of filmmaking or the sensibilities of audiences - who bear the blame for ruining the magic of cinema.

We went from everything being bright teal and orange …

… to everything being a slightly tinted shade of dark gray.

Incidentally, this problem is bigger than color grading. In all likelihood, The Little Mermaid will probably have none of the charm or originality of the original animated feature. It will be just another very well-made but utterly soulless and synthetic product from the Hollywood factory, of which Disney is the foremost exemplar.

The issue is this: it isn’t just the look of movies that is dictated by market-trend-obsessed studio executives, it’s everything. The scripts, the topics, the dialogue, the cast - every bit of every studio picture (including those made by companies like Netflix and HBO) is now the result of research, polling, and ideological screening that squeezes out every drop of originality, and smothers the faintest whiff of anything that might be construed as problematic.

Viewed in this way, the ubiquitous, desaturated palette of modern films makes perfect sense. If Hollywood is going to drain all the magic and creativity out of movies, it may as well drain the color. Given the public’s reluctance to be part of Ariel’s gloomy new world, the studio executives might scramble to crank up the chroma, but, like Ursula the sea witch, they are unlikely to voluntarily give filmmakers back their voice.