Kandy Shepherd

Nobody has ever made the dark feel as real as old Disney did. In these films the night isn't an absence of light. It's a color, and someone mixed it by hand… Disney had its own paint laboratory, built by a woman named Mary Weiser, the first of its kind in animation. Its job was to invent shades that did not exist yet. In the early thirties, when the studio was still making shorts, there were around eighty shades on the shelves. By the time they finished Snow White there were fifteen hundred. Every one of them went on by hand, cel by cel, and each cel needed hours to dry before it could be photographed. The Ink and Paint department was almost entirely women. According to the Walt Disney Family Museum, the paints were sometimes named after them, and to have a color carry your name was considered an honour. So the dark of Bambi's forest, the lamplight in Geppetto's workshop, the blue at Cinderella's attic window: none of it is a filter or a setting or a dimmer turned down. Each is a specific colour that a specific person mixed in a jar, and some of those jars had her name on the label. That is why these scenes still feel more alive than anything made since. We went from hands, to computers, to AI, and at every step there is a little less of the person left in it… The author Joanna Maciejewska said it better than anyone: "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."