In the western film genre, the color palette tends to be brown and earth tone to highlight the dusty terrain and frontier towns. “Home on the Range” ventures into uncharted territory and breaks all the rules with its bright colors and stylish designs. “We wanted the colors in our film to be very playful,” explains art director David Cutler. “A great example of that is the western town where we have buildings that are purple, yellow, and blue. We could have made the film more monochromatic, but we went for a more colorful and playful look. We were influenced a lot by the legendary color stylist Mary Blair, who had such a big impact on ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland.’”
This playful use of colors is particularly evident in the song sequence, “Yodel-Adle-Eedle-Idle-Oo,” where Alameda Slim yodels as backgrounds and characters change colors in rapid order. Directors Finn and Sanford wanted Slim’s yodel soliloquy to be one of the most colorful sequences in a Disney movie and take its place along such other classic moments as “Pink Elephants on Parade” from “Dumbo,” and the “Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat” number in “The Aristocats.”
Background supervisor Cristy Maltese Lynch notes, “We went kind of wild in that sequence because we wanted the audience to experience what the cows were feeling. They don’t know what’s going on. All this weird stuff is happening. They’re seeing the world through different eyes and they’re hearing music that is taking them away. They have no control over what’s happening. We let the audience have a little taste of that.”
Lynch and her team added to the film’s unique look by pushing the color palette and by giving the film a handcrafted look.
“When I first gathered the background team together, I asked them to approach their paintings as if they were a craft project,” says Lynch. “I asked them to remember back to when they were in kindergarten, and they would cut colored paper, and glue macaroni and beans and sequins onto it. That was the approach we wanted for this film, as opposed to a rendered painting. Our film is very graphic and textural. The backgrounds are not illustrations, or beautiful landscape paintings in oil, but something closer to a crafts project.”
The background department used a technique called “faceting” to reinforce the film’s graphic style. Typically, the artists would lay down a flat plain of color, and then go back on top of that with other angular areas of color. Pieces of textured watercolor paper or fabric painted a different color might be layered on top of a painted area. This hard-edge faceting provided a jewel-like quality to the skies, mountains, and other background objects. When composited with the characters, it created the illusion of perspective, with lots of visible ruts, grains and textures.
From a layout perspective, Jean-Christophe Poulain and his team tried to give the film a sense of the camera work and composition of classic western films.
Cutler elaborates, “Watching John Ford movies like ‘The Searchers’ and ‘My Darling Clementine,’ we learned a lot about the scope and intimacy of westerns. In our film, when we’re on the dairy farm, the camera is pretty close in and there is a sense of intimacy. As the cows go off on their adventure and become fish out of water, we tried to open things up more and more in the landscapes. The camera pulls back further so that you get a sense that they’re in a vastly bigger world than their little home on the farm.
Movie Database
In Theaters
