This is what Jerry Rees told me:

“My art director Brian McEntee and I worked out a progressive increase in the red tint - which builds as the action gets more intense, then fades once Toaster has successfully stopped the crusher. But the film lab kept trying to take the red out. Very frustrating. Brian had to keep tabs on them for every shot - letting them know that his carefully chosen series of filters had been mounted on the camera shot-by-shot, so the negative would permanently hold our intentions. But the lab was so used to “normalizing” live action footage, rather than accepting the purposeful stylizations of animation footage that they never truly got out of the way. The film print we showed at Sundance looked very close to what I had hoped for. The Disney home video release (which introduced a side-to-side wobble throughout the opening that was NOT in our original footage) at least kept my basic intention for the red - although they didn’t go through a true color balance check with Brian and me.”