


This paper explores the professional cross-connections between the Walt Disney studios, who pioneered the early adoption of Technicolor IV, DuPont, whose chemical research provided the colour pigments and Pyralin cels used in Disney’s films, and Faber Birren, one of the most influential corporate American consultants in colour design and marketing. It considers several aspects of colour that have not previously been considered in colour or animation studies: first, the material history of cellulose nitrate and acetate and its structural and aesthetic relationship to colour and transparency in animation; second, the role that colour paints and pigments developed by the DuPont company played as part of its targeting of Hollywood as a strategic new market, and third, the ways in which colour production was aesthetically informed by colour consultants like Birren across multiple realms, from cinema to interior design and architecture. By considering how colour production and design was situated within larger corporate strategies at DuPont in which colour was key to its industrial and consumer markets, I hope to enrich our understanding of the role that Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren played in the colour revolution of the mid-twentieth century.



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The Colour Revolution: Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren
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The Colour Revolution: Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren
Kirsten Moana Thompson, Seattle University




                       Meanings, like colors, express neither truth nor value if they are
                       separated from the various modes in which they are ‘given’ or taken
                       away. These modes are connected to forms, to techniques, to the
                       manual history of production. In practice, colours subsist in a rela-
                       tionship of simple correspondence or cause, connecting how they
                       are seen with how they are produced.
                                                  (Manlio Brusatin, A History of Colours)


Abstract

   This paper explores the professional cross-connections between the Walt
   Disney studios, who pioneered the early adoption of Technicolor IV, DuPont,
   whose chemical research provided the colour pigments and Pyralin cels used in
   Disney’s films, and Faber Birren, one of the most influential corporate American
   consultants in colour design and marketing. It considers several aspects of
   colour that have not previously been considered in colour or animation studies:
   first, the material history of cellulose nitrate and acetate and its structural and
   aesthetic relationship to colour and transparency in animation; second, the role
   that colour paints and pigments developed by the DuPont company played as
   part of its targeting of Hollywood as a strategic new market, and third, the ways
   in which colour production was aesthetically informed by colour consultants like
   Birren across multiple realms, from cinema to interior design and architecture.
   By considering how colour production and design was situated within larger
   corporate strategies at DuPont in which colour was key to its industrial and
   consumer markets, I hope to enrich our understanding of the role that Disney,
   DuPont and Faber Birren played in the colour revolution of the mid-twentieth
   century.


   Colour cinematography and the Ink and Paint department were key attractions
in Disney films, while also playing a spectacular narrative role in features like
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (Dave Hand, 1937) and The Reluctant Dragon
(Alfred Werker, 1941). Celebrating its new colour range in Technicolor, Disney’s
promotional rhetoric emphasized its material colour production as expensive,

                                                 Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 32, Spring 2019
                                    Kirsten Moana Thompson


exotic and luxurious.1 In a 1930s Disney press release, colour’s aesthetic
quality was emphasized: ‘In seeking perfection in colour reproduction Disney
technicians have […] developed paints which in beauty and reliability excel all
watercolours of the past’,2 and celebrated onscreen in The Reluctant Dragon’s
‘Rainbow Room’, in a montage sequence devoted to the Disney Ink and Paint
department’s transformation of prodiegetic pigments and paints into the final
colour image. From its first Silly Symphony in colour, Flowers and Trees (Burt
Gillett, 1932), colour was a value that marked Disney’s product as qualitatively
different from earlier two-strip subtractive color processes in animation like
Technicolor III, Multicolor or Harriscolor, or the later Cinecolor.3 With an
exclusive contract for Technicolor IV between 1932–34, Disney produced
cartoons with a new colour palette that no other cartoon studio could match.4
With complementary (red and green) and triadic colour schemes (red, blue and
yellow) in narratives where toys, candy and Christmas were frequent devices for
expressive display in its Silly Symphony series, like The Night Before Christmas
(Wilfred Jackson, 1933) or The Cookie Carnival (Ben Sharpsteen, 1935), Disney
also offered a more nuanced pastel palette in the feature film Snow White, with
light browns, blues and greens.5 In its animated stories, the studio imagined
colour’s material production process as magical, even transgressive, with off-
screen gender and labor practices sometimes shaping on-screen representational
practices.6 For example, in Snow White, the Wicked Queen uses coloured liquids
to transform her beautiful surface into an ugly hag, musing to herself: ‘Now… a
formula to transform my beauty into ugliness, change my queenly raiment to a


1
   For more information on Disney’s Ink and Paint Department’s use of colour paints and
pigments, see Kirsten Moana Thompson, ‘“Quick—Like a Bunny!”. The Ink and Paint Machine,
Female Labour and Color Production’, Animation Studies, 9 (February 2014), <https://journal.
animationstudies.org/kirsten-thompson-quick-like-a-bunny/> [accessed 6 February 2019].
2
  ‘Premium’ (Walt Disney Studios Press Release, [n.d]). Walt Disney Clippings, 1938–1946,
Publicity Ephemera, UCLA Performing Arts Collection.
3
  James Layton and David Pierce, The Dawn of Technicolor, 1915–1935 (Rochester, NY: George
Eastman House, 2015), pp. 268–77.
4
  Ted Eshbaugh made an important early Technicolor IV test cartoon, Wizard of Oz (1932–33), that
was never theatrically released. John McElwee, ‘A Cartoon Pioneer We’ve Forgotten’, 21 October
2014, Greenbriar Picture Shows, <http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-
cartoon-master-weve-forgotten.html> [accessed 6 February 2019].
5
  A British writer described it this way: ‘The new Technicolour [sic] gives clear full yellow, pale
blue that is clean. Light browns as well as dark browns; rich ivy green besides emerald and olive.
The lightest of colours are possible, shell pinks, the strange greens of layers of water, lily white.’
Robert Herring, ‘The Cartoon Color-Film’, Close Up, 10, March 1933, p. 86.
6
  See Thompson, ‘Colorful Material Histories: the Disney Paint Formulae, the Paint Laboratory
and the Ink and Paint Department’, Animation Practice, Process and Production, 4.1 (2014), 45–66.
For an expanded discussion of the gendered labor practices of colour production as transgressive
femininity, see Thompson, ‘“Quick—Like a Bunny!”’. Like Snow White, contemporary artist Sarah
Maple’s photographic installation Snow White the Scientist (2011) underscores the transgressive
connection between femininity and colour production as part of her Princess Series, which
reimagines Disney heroines in modern workplaces, <https://www.sarahmaple.com/paintings-2/#/
new-gallery-4> [accessed 6 February 2019].

40
                   The Colour Revolution: Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren


peddler’s cloak. Mummy dust to make me old; to shroud my clothes, the black
of night; to age my voice, an old hag’s cackle; to whiten my hair, a scream of
fright; a blast of wind to fan my hate; a thunderbolt to mix it well; now begin
thy magic spell.’ The Wicked Queen’s spell showcases colour’s materiality as
transformative agent, while it also alerts us to the connection between cosmetic
surface and normative ideas of femininity and beauty. As she bathes a red apple
in a poisonous cauldron of sickly green colour, advising us: ‘Look on the skin!
The symbol of what lies within!’, her transformation has also exposed the
Queen’s literal and metaphorical ugliness. This diabolical corruption by means
of colour links the scene to a long philosophical tradition (disegno vs colore) in
which colour was considered to be a lapse from normative classicism and in
which form and line were privileged over hue. In a parallel laboratory scene in
The Worm Turns (Ben Sharpsteen, 1937), Mickey Mouse, wearing bright red
gloves and a white lab coat, is working late at night on a secret formula called the
Courage Builder (‘The Weak Made Strong’). In striking staging with dramatic
shadows and meticulous attention to shadow and light, Mickey is surrounded by
flasks, beakers and test tubes in highly saturated hues of reds, greens, blues and
purples. In pursuit of his magic formula, Mickey pours coloured liquids from
beaker to test tube, each time producing bubbling, sputtering and sparking puffs
of colour (with automobile sound effects) as the experiment progresses. While
colour is certainly verisimilitudinous, marking Disney’s distinctive attention to
the lighting and materiality of liquids and glass, what is ultimately staged is the
spectacular relay of transforming colours, the sensual seduction of Technicolor
candy ready for us to visually consume. Here the supernatural storyline is a
narrative pretext to foreground colour as colour, as transparent as the laboratory
glassware. From the scintillating gems in the Seven Dwarves’ diamond mine to
the Wicked Queen’s poisonous-red apple in its bubbling cauldron, colour was in
constant transformational movement, from liquid to gas to solid: it was animated.
   In pioneering the early adoption of Technicolor IV in the film industry, well
before most major studios took up the new colour process, the Disney studio
played a vital role in the colour revolution,7 as a key site for the increasing
dissemination of colour in many aspects of popular culture and everyday life.8
In a similar fashion, the DuPont Corporation also played a critical role through
its research and manufacture of synthetic dyes, pigments, plastics and paints for
industrial and consumer use, that in turn helped reshape business and retail in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Beginning in the early 1920s, and
as part of its strategic targeting of Hollywood as an important market, DuPont

7
 Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
8
  Of the extensive body of literature on Disney, key texts on colour include Richard Neupert,
‘Painting a Plausible World: Disney’s Color Prototypes’, in Disney Discourse: Producing the
Magic Kingdom, ed. by Eric L. Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 106–17; ‘A Studio
Built of Bricks: Disney and Technicolor’, Film Reader, 6 (April 1985), 33–40; J. P. Telotte, The
Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2008), and Esther Leslie,
Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2002).

                                                                                             41
                                 Kirsten Moana Thompson


provided two key materials to Disney as the studio produced its cel animation and
later expanded into colour in 1932: first, the transparent nitrate (and later acetate
and plastic) cels under the name of Pyralin, and second, Monastral pigments
used by Disney to manufacture its in-house paint for the final artwork produced
on these cels. Led by colour consultants like Howard Ketcham and Faber Birren,
whose philosophical and psychological understandings of colour informed the
range and palette of its product line, as well as its marketing to consumers,
business and government, DuPont in turn helped transform twentieth century
colour, from interior design to textiles, lighting and architecture. As two leading
corporations in American manufacturing and entertainment, DuPont and Disney
offer a useful case study for understanding the complex intersections of material
history and aesthetic design that shaped visual culture in the colour revolution.
   As with live action cinema, the role of colour in cel animation is a complicated
one. The luminosity, hue and saturation of animated colours on screen was shaped
by the use of specific prodiegetic materials, from the types of nitrate or acetate
cels used as inked and painted surfaces for the artwork, to the pencils, pastels,
chalks, watercolour or oil paints. The lighting conditions employed to photograph
the cels and the type of platen glass under which they were photographed, all
affected the clarity, value and saturation of the artwork’s colours, as did the
cinematographic processes in which these cels were then photographed and
printed, from Cinecolor to Technicolor IV. The conditions under which the films
were projected, from ambient illumination to the light bulbs, lens and focus of
the projector, also affected the sharpness and brilliance of the colours exhibited,
as Disney was all too aware.9 Finally, the specific properties of the production
materials manufactured by DuPont also enabled or restricted the colour range of
Disney’s prodiegetic artwork.


DuPont and Disney’s Material Relationships

   Founded on the gunpowder mills established on the Brandywine River by E. I.
du Pont de Nemours in Wilmington, Delaware in 1802, the DuPont corporation
would become a huge conglomerate by the twentieth century, developing
or buying the patents for Nylon, Kevlar, Teflon, Lycra and hundreds of other
chemicals, and establishing major industrial and consumer lines in explosives,
insecticides and fungicides, rubber chemicals, dyestuffs, paints and pigments.10
Many DuPont products stemmed from similar roots, beginning with a twentieth


9
   For Disney’s efforts to educate projectionists, see Paul Cramer, ‘Cooperative Job Ahead’,
Projection, 10 (1938), 22–26.
10
   E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company, DuPont: The Autobiography of An American Enterprise:
The Story of E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company (New York: Scribner/Simon and Schuster,
1952) and Alfred Du Pont Chandler and Stephen Salisbury, Pierre S. Du Pont and the Making of
the Modern Corporation (New York: Harper, 1971).

42
                 The Colour Revolution: Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren


                                                               Fig. 1: Better Living
                                                               Through Chemistry (Hagley
                                                               Library, 1946 Pamphlet)




century expansion shaped by the huge range of products derived from one
key raw material, cellulose, or the fibre from the cell walls of plants. Different
treatment methods of cellulose with nitric (and later, acetic) acid led to a huge
range of diverse products, encapsulated by its slogan ‘Better Things for Better
Living… Through Chemistry’, including DuPont cellophane, celluloid film,
Duco (an enamel that coated colours to cars), Rayon and Pyralin (fig. 1).
   In 1915 DuPont acquired the Arlington company, a manufacturer of tortoise
shell combs who had created a synthetic plastic called Pyralin in 1883. With the
acquisition of the Viscoloid Co. in 1925, together these would form the core of
DuPont’s Plastics division (founded in 1936), which specialized in manufacturing
a wide variety of consumer goods, from women’s hairbrushes to war munitions
and cellophane.11 Around 1911, as an effect of the popularity of bobbed hair,


11
  Viscoloid Co. 1926–1928. Trade Catalogues, Box 4 and Public Affairs Department Records,
1915–1981, Hagley Library.

                                                                                      43
                                  Kirsten Moana Thompson


the combmaking industry faced declining sales, and with the First World War
faced additional shortages in raw materials. In 1912, DuPont’s monopoly on the
explosives industry ended with an antitrust decision that forced the company
to diversify, and, for all these reasons, DuPont started to expand its products to
new markets and users, particularly the film industry.12


DuPont Pyralin

   Like both Kodak and Technicolor, DuPont’s research laboratory was key
to the company’s growth,13 and with selective poaching of British chemists
from its competitors, DuPont began manufacturing positive film, as well as
panchromatic and orthochromatic negative film in 1925. DuPont base film
stock was developed from nitrocellulose, but its gelatin film emulsion was
created from animal products like ossein (the collagen produced from cattle and
buffalo bones), splits (the inside layer of cattle skin), calfskin and porkskin. In
other words, the materiality of DuPont cinematic products had a direct, indeed
structural relationship to the plant and animal worlds through their simulation
or literal incorporation of plant or animal products into their material bases, but
also in their use as aesthetic surface for the representation of flora and fauna in
films like Fantasia (Wilfred Jackson, 1940), Dumbo (Ben Sharpsteen, 1941) and
Bambi (Dave Hand, 1942). DuPont’s transparent Pyralin or Pyroxylin plastic
film (without the gelatin emulsion) was marketed in 1920 as the ‘material of a
thousand uses’,14 and was a new synthetic plastic which could mimic dozens of
natural products from ivory to tortoiseshell and leather, a distinctive feature
of what Jeffrey Miekle calls ‘celluloid’s powers of mimicry’.15 Pyralin was
manufactured in tubes, rods or sheets and could be bonded to metal, wood,
plastic and glass. Providing insulation against heat, cold and sound, it had a
high structural strength. Pyralin and the later acetate plastic or ‘Plastacele’
were non-flammable and were widely used in consumer devices from fountain
pens to toothbrushes, combs, piano keys, poker chips, eyeglasses and toiletry
products. In its transparent form, it was used in lantern slides, automobile safety
glass and lampshades, while the company also boasted that ‘Pyralin is available
[...] — in hundreds of colour effects and colour combinations — Ivories, Jades,
Shells, Pearls, Mahoganies — all are truly duplicated in Pyralin’.16 In the form of


12
   Luci Marzola, ‘“Better Pictures Through Chemistry”: DuPont and the Fight for the Hollywood
Film Stock Market’, Velvet Light Trap, 76 (Fall 2015), 3–18 (p. 7).
13
   Marzola, pp. 8 and 10.
14
   DuPont Advertisements (Wilmington, DE: Du Pont de Nemours, 1920), p. 6, ‘Collection of Nine
Folders Illustrating the Advertisements of Pyralin’, Hagley Library.
15
   Cited in Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 108.
16
   ‘What Next Will Be Made of Pyraline?’ Pamphlet (Arlington, NJ: DuPont Nemours, c.1920),
Pyralin Dept, Trade Literature, 1926–1928, Hagley Library.

44
                   The Colour Revolution: Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren


thin sheets called cels, Pyralin was lightweight and abrasion resistant, offering a
temporary surface on which artwork could be painted and then photographed
frame by frame, to create the illusion of movement in animation. Colourlessness
and transparency were essential properties ensuring maximal legibility of the
vibrancy of the colours painted on the palimpsest of cels and background
paintings, while the additional benefits of flexibility and durability afforded by
plasticizers ensured that the cels could withstand the manipulations of inkers,
painters and camera operators.17
   Not only was Hollywood a market for DuPont products like Pyralin, but it
was also a means by which DuPont promoted the value of its products to other
potential customers. In February 1923, ‘Pyralin’s Unique Use in the Movies’
appeared in The DuPont Magazine featuring Bud Fisher’s popular animated
characters Mutt and Jeff from DuPont’s client, the Raoul Barré studio, along
with illustrations provided by Scientific American editor and author of the
Cinema Handbook A. C. Lescaboura.18 Although Disney is not mentioned at
this early stage, Laugh-o-Gram bankruptcy records show that at least as early as
30 November 1923 DuPont was already a supplier, with Disney invoiced for an
unpaid bill for 200 20” x 50” sheets of Pyralin.19 By December 1934 in The DuPont
Magazine, Hazel Sewell, head of Disney’s Ink and Paint department, appeared
in a photo promoting a Pyralin cel of Mickey Mouse, and in the very next issue
in February 1935, in ‘Behind the Scenes with Mickey Mouse’, DuPont used
Disney’s popular new character to advertise Pyralin’s suitability for animation.
By 6 September 1938 in another trade magazine, DuPont advertised Pyralin
through its use on the recently released feature Snow White, with the company
also offering customer service teams to ‘cooperate with you in determining
how Pyralin may be used practically and usefully applied in solving problems
pertaining to your business’.20 Meanwhile, correspondence in the 1930s between
Disney and DuPont show the studio’s increasing production demands of Snow
White, with DuPont accommodating them by decreasing the size and width of
the Pyralin plastic cels to 10″ x 12″ x 1/16″ at Disney’s request.21



17
   Because of these plasticizers, the surface of the artwork eventually became an unstable chemical
compound subject to cracking, chipping and degassing. Kristen McCormick and Michael R.
Schilling, ‘Animation Cels: Preserving a Portion of Cinematic History’, Conservation of Plastics
(Spring 2014), 1–7.
18
   ‘Pyralin’s Unique Use in the Movies’, The DuPont Magazine, 17.2, February 1923, p. 5.
19
   Michael Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2007), p. 335n; Timothy Susanin, Walt Before Mickey: Disney’s Early Years, 1919–1928
(Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2011), p. 242n. Animator Rudy Ising confirmed DuPont
decreased cels to 1/16″.
20
    Photo in The DuPont Magazine, 28.12, December 1934, p. 10; R. T. Ellis, ‘Behind the Scenes
with Mickey Mouse’, The DuPont Magazine, 29.1–2, February 1935, p. 5; Advertisement for Snow
White, 6 September 1938, courtesy Russell Merritt, 2015.
21
   ‘Animation’s Volatile Relationship With Plastic’, 1 June 2015, <https://d23.com/getty-animation-
research-library/> [accessed 6 February 2019].

                                                                                                45
                                  Kirsten Moana Thompson


DuPont Colour

   DuPont also promoted its other nitrocellulose products to the film industry,
from nitrate and replacement safety film to explosives for clearing land for
movie production, and even lacquer paint for set design and movie props.22 In
‘Lacquer’s Screen Career’, DuPont’s trade literature suggested that its colour
paint on the sets of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 production Cleopatra signified quality
and luxury, and by extension, that DuPont colour was part of the glamour of
Cleopatra’s court and of Hollywood.23 Even though Cleopatra was shot in black
and white, the high sheen of DuPont’s expensive colour paint offered high
production values, and as its advertising suggested, transformed cheap props
and sets into expensive objects. DuPont even developed a tool to ensure this
glossiness and measure the reflection of light in its paints, lacquers and varnishes
with the Pfund Glossimeter. Additionally, The DuPont Magazine noted that,
even though the lacquer was not visible as colour on film, it nonetheless helped
promote a psychological effect of ‘realness’ in the actors: ‘Realistic backgrounds
and “props” assist the players to throw themselves into their roles, to get the feel of
their parts. The rich trappings, glittering colours and highlighted accoutrements
of the Romans all served to intensify the mood of pageantry in pictures like
Cleopatra.’24 In this respect, DuPont trade ads repeatedly emphasized Pyralin
and Duco paints’ quality to justify their expensive pricetag: ‘best — because they
have no settling in the can, the pigment being permanently suspended in the
solution’, said one 1920s ad for Pyralin Enamels.25
   Supervising colour design of a number of DuPont divisions, including Duco
paint from 1927 to 1935, was DuPont’s ‘colour engineer’ Howard Ketcham,
before he became a freelance colour consultant to Pan Am, General Electric
and other corporations. Ketcham standardized and simplified DuPont’s
automotive Duco colour line, radically reducing it from 11,500 down to 290
colours, adopting Munsell’s colour system of hue, chroma and value and
reinforcing DuPont’s promotion of colour with quality. Between 1935 and
1940, Ketcham consulted with DuPont to design coloured plastic Pyralin
for bathroom products like mirrors, combs and makeup containers. In ‘Rare
Colors Revived’, DuPont Magazine explicitly linked Ketcham’s designs with
craft traditions of luxury and quality in English and American marble glass,
observing that ‘Regency period “Pyralin” faithfully simulates in color and
tone value this early American glass, a triumph for Howard Ketcham and


22
   ‘How Mighty is Dynamite?’, The DuPont Magazine, 28.11, November 1934, pp. 1 and 16.
23
   Laing, ‘Lacquer’s Screen Career’, The DuPont Magazine, 29.1–2, February 1935, pp. 8–9 and
24; D.V. Gregory and A.V. Wetlaufer, ‘How Glossy is Glossy?’, The DuPont Magazine, 24.4, April
1930, p. 18.
24
   Laing, pp. 9 and 24.
25
   ‘DuPont Pyralin Enamels: Best for Non Breakables’, DuPont Advertisements, Group A, papers
4 & 5, Hagley Library.

46
                  The Colour Revolution: Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren


the craftsmen of the DuPont Viscoloid Co. Inc. for they have reproduced in
boudoir accessories the most prized colors’.26
   Ketcham’s colour design across the DuPont product line was in keeping
with the corporation’s transmedial promotion of its plastics, pigments and
textiles as quality and luxury goods. Pyralin’s toughness and durability, as well
as the brilliancy of DuPont Duco enamel paint made it particularly suitable
for quick-drying automotive paint finishes, but also as lamination on superior
toys for children. In an advertisement for Pyralin enamel toys in 1920, DuPont
acknowledged that ‘they cost more than any enamels made — but they deliver
more in quality and covering, most per dollar of cost’.27 Similarly, rubber toys
of Disney characters like Pluto, Ferdinand the Bull and the Three Little Pigs,
made by Seiberling Latex Co. of Akron, OH, also used DuPont chemicals and
laminated colours and were featured in trade literature, demonstrating the
embedded material continuum between on- and offscreen Disney characters and
the DuPont corporation.28
   DuPont and Disney’s material relationship extended from plastics into black-
and-white and colour pigments. Disney established an Ink and Paint department
in its very first studio in Kingswell in 1923, led by supervisor Hazel Sewell. A
problem encountered by all animation studios was that off the shelf Grumbacher
paints failed to adhere to the slippery surface of the DuPont nitrate cels, and
eventually specialized manufacturers like the Catalina Color Co. (later Cartoon
Colour Co.) would emerge to supply the animation industry with speciality paints
that would adhere to these surfaces. However, unlike Warner Bros. and MGM,
the Disney studio shifted to manufacturing its own paint as it was cheaper to buy
the pigments from suppliers like DuPont and produce in bulk on the studio lot.
   Made by the women of the Ink and Paint department with the assistance of a
specialized laboratory, paint was manufactured following colour formula index
cards, together with their specific ‘letdowns’, or lighter or darker tints which
compensated for the multiple cel layers that made up the composite artwork of
cel animation. Comparisons between the paint product codes on Disney’s colour
formula cards and DuPont’s Standard Pigment Colours (Wilmington, DE: Du
Pont Nemours, 1941), reveal these pigment preferences. Having acquired the
Krebs Company in 1929 which specialized in lithopone and titanium dioxide,
DuPont specialized in the bulk of Disney’s most vibrant colours.29 The brilliancy
of DuPont pigments included chrome yellows, chrome greens, iron blues,


26
   ‘Rare Colors Revived’, The DuPont Magazine, 29.10, October 1935, p. 20.
27
   DuPont Advertisements (Wilmington, DE: DuPont Nemours, 1920), Hagley Library.
28
    ‘Toyland Telegraph’ Advertisement for Seiberling Latex Co., The DuPont Magazine, 31.11,
November 1937, p. 1; The DuPont Magazine, 33.1–2, February 1939, p. 15; The DuPont Magazine,
33.12, Holiday issue, 1939, p. 12.
29
   The formula cards also indicate other suppliers, including Hoover, especially for browns and
blacks; SCM (for yellows, and cadmium reds); Harcros/Pfizer (for the oxide reds, yellows and
greens) and Mobay (formerly Harmon) and Imperial/Harshaw for certain reds (MV6606 or Red
88; MX686 or Red 83).

                                                                                            47
                                   Kirsten Moana Thompson


organic lakes and toners, particularly Pthalocyanine blue (BT-297 D) or Platinum
Violet (BP-273-D) or Monastral blue, which were used for rich detailing like the
Queen’s and Snow White’s purple and blue costumes in Snow White.30 By 1953
DuPont also offered new pastel hues derived from titanium dioxide, such as blue-
green, copper, pink and rose that cut across product lines, from automobiles to
telephone handsets, printing inks, floor coverings and textile fibres.31
   Disney’s initial colour formula recipes were based on the Munsell colour
system. After the shift in 1939 to the new Burbank studio, the Color Paint Lab,
headed by Mary Weiser and Production Process Laboratory headed by Emilio
Bianchi, were established. Disney employee Herman Schultheis described the
colour production process in this way:

     The paints are mixed in the paint lab at the studio from formulas by trained chemists.
     Pigments (animal, vegetable and mineral) are ground and mixed. Several hundred
     hues with 7 values each (from dark to light) are kept here. Inharmonious colours are
     avoided and pastel shades are used mostly. Color schemes have to be changed when
     character moves from sun into shadow, etc.32

    Disney’s opaque paint had a much higher quotient of gum arabic, in
comparison to Warner Bros.’ unstable casein-based paint. Its textural thickness
made the paint adhere to the cel and gave it a jewel-like quality because the
pigments would sink to the bottom adhering to the cel, with the paint above
it, so the colour was against the cel, enhancing its intensity.33 As my previous
research has shown, the colour formulas confirm that there was a qualitative
difference in Disney paint: its colours were more brilliant because of its vibrant
DuPont pigments, while its technical application was easier because of its greater
viscosity and elasticity.34 Not only did DuPont supply key materials that helped
create Disney characters both on- and offscreen, and also use the animation
industry to cross promote its own product lines, it also influenced Disney
colour aesthetics through its own colour consultant. Thus far, we have seen that
Disney’s use of DuPont Pyralin, pigments and paints demonstrated the studio’s
insistence on quality and vibrancy in its prodiegetic materials, enriching the
artwork photographed by its Technicolor cameras that would in turn position


30
   Colour Laboratory and Ink and Paint Department Historical Material. Personal Collection, Lew
Stude and interviews 1 May 2014, transcript, pp. 1–30, and 1–3 August 2015, transcript, pp. 1–72,
Burbank, CA.
31
   Emily Heine, ‘Color Sells Itself’, The DuPont Magazine, 51.2, April–May 1957, pp. 2–5.
32
   John Canemaker, The Last Notebook: Herman Schultheis and the Secrets of Walt Disney’s Movie
Magic (Los Angeles: Walt Disney Family Foundation Press, 2014). All paint consists of three major
ingredients: the pigment (or hue), the vehicle or base in which the pigment is suspended (oil or
water), and the binder, which can offer gloss, elasticity or strength. In addition there are often
softeners for pliability and humectants to attenuate drying.
33
   Stephen Worth interviews 30 April 2014, transcript, pp. 1–37, and 13 August 2015, transcript,
pp. 1–28 and correspondence, Pacoima, CA.
34
   Thompson, ‘Colourful Material Histories’, p. 55.

48
                   The Colour Revolution: Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren


Disney as an innovative technological leader in the use of colour in Hollywood
and animated film markets. Manufacturing its paints in bulk from DuPont
pigments not only saved Disney money, but also afforded it creative control to
broaden and nuance its rich colour palette for its feature films, while also using
colour as an important brand signifier of aesthetic value and spectacle. Similarly,
DuPont’s targeting of the Hollywood film industry was an important part of
the company’s broader diversification of its products, from celluloid to lacquer
paint, in which DuPont marketed its goods as indices of aesthetic luxury and
value, while also using the glamour of its association with stars like Mickey
Mouse to cross promote itself to other business. For both Disney and DuPont,
colour played a central role in their promotional strategies to differentiate
themselves in the marketplace. DuPont was a leading producer of the synthetic
raw materials for the consumer goods and services that would feed the colour
revolution, from interior design to architecture, textiles and printing, while
Disney’s early adoption of synthetic colour marked them out as an innovative
producer of the entertainment industry in colour. Each company would come
to use the services of a leading colour engineer, designer and philosopher in that
colour revolution named Faber Birren (1900–1988).


Faber Birren and Colour at Work

   As part of Walt Disney Studio’s newly established internal training program,
in which notable scholars, artists and teachers offered lectures for its animation
workers, leading colour consultant Faber Birren delivered ten talks at the studio
over two weeks in early 1939, which discussed ‘the history, science, psychology
and modern applications of colour’.35 The author of forty books and 254
articles on colour, Birren founded American Color Trends, a notable pioneer
in industrial colour design that consulted for factories, hospitals, schools and
companies, including DuPont, Monsanto, Allied Chemical and General Electric.
To enhance productivity and safety in factories, Birren developed a colour coded
system (orange for alerts, green for safety equipment, yellow for hazards, blue
for caution, and so on) and also produced similar colour protocols for the US
Navy, Army and Coastguard. His pioneering work understood that functionalist
colour design minimised eye fatigue, maximised visibility and directed visual
attention, producing an unconscious form of automatic response in the worker:
‘the trick is to establish a seeing condition that automatically, in and of itself,
makes the task easier’.36 Birren also specialized in the psychological effects of
colour design, advising how changing hues could help advertising and businesses


35
   Birren, ‘Color Preferences’, 20 April 1939, Disney Development Program, 7 pages, in Don Hahn
and Tracy Miller-Zarnecke, Before Ever After: The Lost Lectures of Walt Disney’s Animation Studio
(Los Angeles: Disney Editions, 2016), pp. 286–293 (p. 286).
36
   Birren, ‘Color in the Plant’, The DuPont Magazine, 39.4, 1945, pp. 10–16.

                                                                                              49
                                 Kirsten Moana Thompson


through guest talks, trade literature and journalism.37 Citing Matthew Luckiesh,
an expert on the relationship of colour and light, Birren noted that colour design
must account for the reflection of light: ‘As Dr Luckiesh, a noted authority in
the lighting field phrases it: “High visibility, ease of seeing and good seeing
conditions are overwhelmingly the result of good brightness engineering”.’38
Designing a ‘Color Conditioning’ program for DuPont that examined the
psychological effects of colour in industrial and consumer spaces like factories
and offices,39 Birren made specific recommendations for changes in hue, in order
to enhance consumer appetite and increase spending; in his words, ‘color has
become a valuable worker on the plant pay roll [sic]’ [emphasis added].40 He
even suggested pigment shades like a purple colour for a fertilizer spreader to
look ‘appropriately springlike in a home garden setting’41 (fig. 2).
   Once a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, Birren’s colour preferences
were strongly influenced by the theories of Ewald Hering and Wilhelm Ostwald,
and his consulting for both Disney and DuPont emphasized the ways in which
colour perception played an active role in colour preferences that was rooted in
our own physiology.42 Like Howard Ketcham, Birren is an important figure who
links the corporate world of industrial and consumer mass production to art,
through his close focus on psychology and cultural and historical understandings
of colour aesthetics. Birren’s lecture ‘Color Preferences’ delivered on 20 April
1939 at Disney drew from his recently published Monument to Color (1938) and
was supplemented by demonstrations to the Disney artists of ‘paints, lights, and
other materials, making his teachings visible, memorable, and most importantly,
true to color’.43 Birren’s colour theories built from his training in art history,
discussing, for example, how the chiaroscuro work of da Vinci or Rembrandt
revealed their intuitive understanding of hue, light and shadow. From these
artistic practices, Birren developed his own theories of colour harmonies that
were built around tints, tones and shades. Influenced by Hering’s triangular
chart of colour, which placed hue on one angle, white on the second and black
on the third, as well as theories by Ostwald, who distinguished between colour
as light and colour as surface pigment, Birren developed a colour chart that
mapped these principles in a triangle made up of seven forms (hue, white, black,
tint, shade, tone, gray), for his ultimate goal was the systematization of colour
harmonies that could be deployed in mass culture: ‘Good color in industry, in
products and commodities of everyday consumption, is high art. It is art spread


37
   Birren, ‘Color and You’, The DuPont Magazine, 42.3, March 1948, pp. 16–17.
38
   Matthew Luckiesh, Light and Colour in Advertising and Merchandising (New York: D. Van
Nostrand, 1923), cited in Birren, ‘Color in the Plant’, p. 11.
39
   Birren, ‘Color and You’, p. 17.
40
   Birren, ‘Color in the Plant’, p. 16.
41
   Heine, ‘Color Sells Itself’, p. 4.
42
   The Enjoyment and Use of Color (New York: Scribner, 1924); Birren, Monument to Color (New
York: McFarland, 1938), pp. 34–35.
43
   Hahn and Miller-Zarnecke, p. 286.

50
                    The Colour Revolution: Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren


                                                                         Fig. 2: Functional Color
                                                                         Design for Safety and
                                                                         Productivity (Hagley
                                                                         Library, 1946 Pamphlet)




everywhere among people and applied to the things they need and the things
that answer their human wants. It is vital art which people eagerly accept and
which is mighty good for them and for society.’44
   In his lecture to the Disney artists, Birren pointed out the role of colour
preferences in consumer attention and retail, describing research by ‘a
manufacturer of toilet articles’, that ‘found that people like red and blue; next is
purple, then green, with orange and yellow last’.45 Birren’s observations around
colour preferences drew upon certain chromophobic and gendered cultural
assumptions, asserting that ‘The negro ranks red and blue highest’, along with


44
  Birren, Monument, p. 50.
45
  Hahn and Miller-Zarnecke, pp. 289–90. Although Birren doesn’t state who the manufacturer is, I
believe it’s likely to be DuPont, given his prior relationship with the company. As the manufacturer’s
research revealed that ‘75% of all toilet articles were given away as presents’, Birren stressed that
colour design of these products must account for this fact.

                                                                                                    51
                                  Kirsten Moana Thompson


‘children, Indians and primitive peoples’, and ‘Even in insane asylums the greatest
response will be to red and blue — they are the two big thrills’.46 Yet irregardless
of what people claimed (‘what people say they like isn’t always the thing they will
respond to’), Birren argued that, ‘In most everything we studied so far there is
a consistent reminder that it is the simple things that people respond to — red,
blue and green’.47 Birren’s approach to colour understood it as sensation, but
one that could be scientifically studied: in Monument to Color, he said, ‘Argue all
you want that color is emotional and therefore beyond rule and law — the fact
remains that even emotion can be sensibly analysed.’48 Concluding his address
to the Disney animators, Birren emphasized that the important thing was to think
in terms of the mass: ‘you’re not concerned with “functional” colour schemes’,
but with ‘the mass of people with the absolute type of color preferences’ and
elsewhere noted that ‘it is always the mass reaction that counts’.49 After a lengthy
discussion of the history of colour symbolism, he emphasized ‘really, when it
comes to color preferences your guess is as good as mine. I have tried to play
with color freely [...] hoping that out of this will grow an attitude on your part
that will make you think of all people, of audiences rather than individuals’.50
Insisting that as artists they were critical shapers of colour preferences, ‘I think it
is your problem not to ask people what they like, but to know what they like’.51
   Birren’s philosophies of colour shaped the industrial palette through his
functional colour design for DuPont finishes, textiles, paints and plastics divisions
while his focus on blue, red, and green and contrasting colour schemes in his
lectures for the Disney company emphasized mass appeal in colour preferences.
Like his work in industrial colour design as the automatization of the attention
and energy of the worker by minimizing eyestrain and directing visual attention,
Birren’s approach to the cultural aesthetics of colour return repeatedly to a
focus on mass preferences, whereby the artist’s role should be to mediate these
mass preferences. In this focus on the mass, the colour consultants, or colour
‘engineers’ as they were called, exemplify the mid-century design principles of
the corporations for whom they worked, in which colour could be scientifically
measured, understood and reverse engineered.
   Animated colour was a material product of corporate modernity. From
the industrial research of corporate laboratories that produced new synthetic
pigments and plastics, to the new aesthetic philosophies of colour consultants,
the professional ties between Disney and DuPont reveal a colour revolution
that was manufactured, designed and consumed to order: in the words of Faber
Birren, ‘Color is a modern art, built upon modern progress.’52

46
   Ivi, p. 289.
47
   Ivi, p 291–92.
48
   Birren, Monument, pp. 11, 27.
49
   Hahn and Miller-Zarnecke, pp. 289, 291.
50
   Ivi, p. 293.
51
   Ibid.
52
   Birren, Monument, p. 27.

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