Cinderella’s 4K restoration team says her colors have been all wrong for decades
When veteran Disney animator and director Eric Goldberg got a chance to work on the studio’s most recent restoration of Cinderella, he had one main goal above all else.
“For many years, Cinderella was not the right colors,” Goldberg laughs. “Her hair [is] dusty blonde, and her dress is silver. And over the years, we’ve seen her hair look the color of Cheez Whiz. We’ve seen her dress be bright blue. We’ve seen all sorts of stuff. So going in, for myself and Michael Giaimo, the very first thing was, Let’s get that hair and dress right.”
A Century of Disney
Kevin Schaeffer, director of restoration at Walt Disney Studios, doesn’t know the specific reason that the colors in Cinderella have gotten so warped in previous releases of the movie. He explains, though, that while previous restorers all had the best intentions in mind, sometimes the end results drifted from the original colors. It became a cycle.
“People will refer back to the last time that was done. They’re interpreting an interpretation, sometimes of an interpretation,” he says.
With this particular restoration, though, the team was able to access the original 1950 prints of Disney’s Cinderella from the Library of Congress. They weren’t copying a copy of a copy; they were going back to where it all started.
“Eric brought in some art from the animation research library that said, This is the hair color. This is the mother’s dress,” Schaeffer says. “That really helped us peg that and get it back to what it really should be, and what it originally was.”
The restoration team, which encompassed people across studio operations and the animation department, was determined to get all the little details consistent. Small elements, like the colors of the tiny animals’
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