By William Keck
Just imagine how dazzled movie theater audiences in 1937 must have been seeing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated feature, presented as a well-saturated, 35mm Technicolor® print.
To mark The Walt Disney Company’s 100th anniversary in October 2023, The Walt Disney Studios’ restoration and archive team determined to return to the original negatives and perform the ultimate restoration of not just Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but also Cinderella (1950) and 27 classic shorts, from Trolley Troubles (1927), with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, to the Goofy-starring Aquamania (1961)—matching each film to the clarity and richness of their original theatrical showings. (All debuted on Disney+ in 2023.)
So what makes these refurbished shorts and 4K ultra-high-definition restorations different from past efforts? Basically, advances in high-dynamic range and state-of-the-art display monitors revealed minute details, defects, and discolorations previously hidden from the human eye. “HDR (high-dynamic range) allows us to provide more brightness, a wider range of color, and sharper and crisper detail in the dark [areas] to get us closer to the original film than we ever have before,” explains Kevin Schaeffer, Director, Restoration & Library Management for The Walt Disney Studios, a 30-year studio employee who has now worked on multiple restorations of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Mary Poppins (1964), and Beauty and the Beast (1991).
The centennial restoration project began with tracking down the films’ original negatives, which in itself was an epic undertaking. The great majority of Disney’s shorts as well as every animated feature from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs all the way through 1950’s Cinderella were captured on nitrate negatives, which, Schaeffer observes, “shows the sharpest, crispest, clearest picture you’re going to get.” But nitrate can also become extremely flammable and potentially explosive. That’s why these delicate reels are safely housed in a protective facility in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Upon being “checked out” from the library, the borrowed nitrate reels were carefully transported to California during cooler months. The negative was then scanned at Picture Shop in Hollywood, and an original nitrate print was screened for the restoration team at UCLA’s Melnitz theater, one of only three screening rooms in Southern California equipped to show such prints.
Before the negatives were returned to the library, 4K scans were made and turned into digital files to be closely inspected for dirt, scratches, dust particles, strobing, fading, inconsistencies, and unintentional omissions. The actual restoration—involving clean-up and color correction—was a group effort employing up to 150 people. And unlike the Fairy Godmother’s spell that expired at midnight, these magical makeovers are made to last forever.
SILVER MEDDLE
Before the restoration of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, unveiled in 2023, the team had first waved its collective wand to give Cinderella its own bibbidi-bobbidi-boo 4K transformation. Just as the Fairy Godmother told Cinderella, even miracles take a little time, and this one took between nine and 10 months, beginning with a proper dusting of the large carpet in the main hall… and the windows and the tapestries and the draperies! Even Lucifer the cat was given a thorough bath.
Schaeffer selected Cinderella, in large part, to address issues that arose from a previous restoration for a previous Blu-ray edition. Along with several generations of film grain, some elements of the animators’ original detail were also inadvertently removed, such as some defining folds in Cinderella’s ball gown. “There is now a whole system of checks and balances in place to make sure that never happens again,” Schaeffer assures.
Previous restorations of Cinderella also left some on the Disney team questioning that ball gown’s intended color: Blue? Pearl gray? Silver? White? Eric Goldberg—Head of Hand-Drawn Animation for The Walt Disney Animation Studios, and the ultimate keeper of the colors—insists “when she first gets the dress it is silver, not blue.”
Simple, right? Not exactly. While Cinderella is dancing with the prince in the moonlight, the dress does in fact turn blue. “It was something the animators intentionally did to reflect a mood,” Goldberg explains, “and now we knew what to recapture to stay true to what the director originally intended.”
And don’t get Goldberg started on Cinderella’s hair. It is, he stresses, “not yellow. It is more dusty blond… Both [Disney Animation production designer] Mike Giaimo and I tried very hard to get it back to how we remember seeing it on film way back when,” says Goldberg. “I pulled a whole bunch of cels, which gave us a road map to go by.” Archived cels also proved invaluable when longtime colorist Mike Underwood worked as hard as Jaq and Gus tracking a nonstop kaleidoscope of colored ribbons, bluebird vests, and mouse hats and hair bows as the dress is being made.
There were also a few errors or omissions on the nitrate negative that warranted repair. “We’d never want to use modern technology to change something that couldn’t be done at the time,” says Schaeffer. “However, if Cinderella is looking at Gus in the little mousetrap and leans in and smiles but suddenly has no neck, that’s an oopsie. So we gave that floating head a neck.”
HAPPILY EVER AFTER
In addition to the restored digital masters, high quality copies of all the features and shorts originally shot on nitrate film stock have been made on safety stock, and these along with the original negatives for everything from 1951 onward are archived in a temperature-controlled vault built on the Disney lot in 2015 to house the crown jewels of the Disney collection, as well as newer acquisitions from ABC Films, Selznick International, and 21st Century Fox.
Housed behind 10-inch-thick walls are some 52,000 reels and just under 4,000 titles, including the original cut negatives of 1951’s post-nitrate Alice in Wonderland all the way through to 1990’s The Rescuers Down Under. Beyond that, beginning with 1991’s Beauty and the Beast, everything shifted to being archived as digital files. But many films created digitally have a film master created to archive as a backup, explains the keeper of the vault, Lisa Fuguet, Senior Manager of the Film Archive. “Film is known to last over 100 years,” Fuguet says, “while the jury’s still out on digital durability.”
The archive team makes sure to inspect all negatives at least once every 25 years. (Fans, of course, can watch the recently restored shorts and features on Disney+, and both Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella are available on 4K Blu-ray.)
As for future restorations, having recently completed remastering the animated Lilo & Stitch (2002), Schaeffer hints the next title selected may be “a little more recent” than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella.
“We all have our wish list on what we want to be restored,” says Goldberg, whose personal picks would be Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan (1953), and Sleeping Beauty (1959), simply to showcase the beautiful color palettes of Disney Legend Mary Blair. “Our hope is that eventually all of the classic features will go through the restoration process to make them look as they did when they were first released.”
(Excerpted and adapted from Disney twenty-three, Winter 2023)
