Coloring the Animated World: Exploring Human Color Perception and Preference through the Animated Film

Animated films present a unique set of challenges and questions to scholars examining films from a cognitive perspective. When the confines of the real world don’t exist as they do in live action films, the filmmaker is confronted with creating the entire narrative space from scratch (Buchan, 2011; Buchan, 2006). How do animators manage this seemingly enormous task? This question certainly predates film; creating space and life in visual art has been a subject of intense study by artists, historians, photographers, and psychologists alike. While the goal may be to create an extremely realistic visual space, the option given to visual artists and animators alike is to abandon tenets of realism in favor of an alternative perspective on the visual world. Animation alone can bring life to inanimate objects, defy laws of physics, and create visual effects impossible in live action film.