Spaced Ranger said:
. Also, I was suspicious of the 35mm's shaded shirt color compared to the 16mm's properly flat, painted cel color:
A quick thought on the 'properly' painted shirt- and, to calm your suspicions (!) it looks like that on the IB print.
A standard Eastmancolor print (like the one you're using and comparing to) looked very different in the first place from the original IB technicolor release. Even a 1971 IB release print looks different than a 1946 original release Nitrate technicolor print- and very different from the Eastman versions. You've actually lost more green and yellow in the Eastmancolor print than can even be recovered from that copy, though I give you huge kudos for trying. Something that needs to be considered about 'accurate' colors on the cels versus the original film is how the Technicolor process worked in the first place- so 'accurate' is thrown out the window entirely since the process NEVER reproduced the color spectrum in any kind of accurate way, in animation or in live action- that's just a basic fact. That said, the Eastman print projected side by side when it was brand new next to a Technicolor print would look drastically different- and did since it was a contact print from a single color neg compared to Technicolor's 3 neg dye transfer process. Color wedges were made of scenes to determine what certain colors would reproduce as in the technicolor process, then painted a color up or down to reproduce the wanted color in the process. This was the only way to do it then. About four years after this film was made Eastman's single color neg allowed a less bulky camera to be used finally for live action, with a single strip of film. Animation was shot progressively- that is, the three color records were shot next to each other on a single strip of film, with the filter wheel turning for each frame, creating the three color records. Technicolor would then take these three records and make the three seperate color negs from those. The printing process using ink created film that looks more like color printing in a magazine from the era rather than a color photograph. Technicolor also often (especially in the early years) took the red negative and made a faze in b/w to boost the contrast on reds (just in live action). So, accurate becomes entirely in how you define it! My thinking is that the closest to 'accurate' would be to have the film look as close as possible to the look of the actual Technicolor release- as gaudy and bright as it is..