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Watch Disney's color palette evolve over 52 films in new history app

Watch Disney's color palette evolve over 52 films in new history app

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disney animated
disney animated

Some of Disney's magic is landing on the iPad today. With a new app called Disney Animated, the movie studio is hoping to give fans an in-depth look at its history and filmmaking process, as well as some never-before-released relics that were made along the way. The app presents all of that history in a couple of different ways: a short book shows readers how a movie goes from concept to the screen, a number of interactive lessons teach the basics of animation, and a few other tools give fans a way to peer into the studio's long history.

A detailed look at every one of Disney's animated features

Perhaps the most detailed of those tools is effectively a way to scrub through every single one of Disney's 52 animated feature films. Disney is calling the feature a Color Map, because it allows users to see the general tone of its pictures as they progress — but actually, the map includes a frame from just about every ten seconds of all of its movies, providing an exceedingly detailed look at each film's art and story.

In addition to new ways to look at old movies, Disney is also including a trove of concept art, animation tests, and character sketches that haven't been seen outside of the company. "We mined our archives for assets that aren't publicly available anywhere else," a Disney representative told The Verge. Some of those assets include a marionette that was used as a reference when crafting Pinocchio, and a small statue of Ursula from The Little Mermaid — now viewable as a 360 degree 3D-scan — that was previously only available to Disney's archivists. Other pieces like storyboards have been published before in print, but on the iPad, zooming in should allow them to be seen in better detail than ever.

Disney Animated app press screenshots

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The app comes from Disney Interactive Studios, which might be better known for working on Disney Infinity, an upcoming game that mashes up a variety of the company's properties into a world that users can sculpt on their own. Disney Animated, which is available today for $13.99, is something of a departure from the company's normal apps, most of which are games aimed at children. Disney says that this new app is supposed to a lot more that that — it's meant to be "a celebration of the art of moviemaking."