I can't get no..saturation!

 Animated films rely heavily upon their use of colour to convey focus, mood and appeal amoung many other things. In some ways the colour can be exaggerated to the point of extreme in such ways that would never normally occur in reality but is important in conveying ideas in the film.

 The term saturation comes into play when measuring the amount of colour being reflected. It is determined by a combination of light intensity its distribution across the spectrum of different wavelengths.

 In the film Ratatouille by Pixar, there is excellent use of saturation and colour theory to suit particular environments and portray varied feelings about particular scenes in the film. You've got the contrast in use of saturation between the rat world and the human world. On a deeper level the colour helps this idea to distinguish two different worlds and connotations associated with both. 

 Sharon Calahan, ... at Pixar animation studios talks about colouring and lighting the film, 'The highlights could go white, but we didn't want the mid-tones and shadows to read grey, so we added small amounts of low intensity saturated illumination to shift the hue. In the kitchen, since its a warmer human world environment, we added a low intensity orange light to shift the hue warmer, we tinted the darks more than the lights since we wanted to keep the whites closer to white and get the rich colours in the darks.' It goes to show hwo much stauration is thought about in film and the effects it has on minuscule proportions of the film.

 In the image above you can see great use of colour and saturation. It really helps describe the lusciousness of the food and the delicacy. The red-purple of the grapes and the yellow of the cheese help convey richness. When compared to a street shot of Paris we can see how saturation as varied throughout the film.

 Look how the saturation of the city is muted yet still represent so much colour range. In contrast a completely different motive to the full on colour of the food scene, 'since we had a restrained palette, it was really important to us that the colours feel rich even though they were not particularly saturated. we wanted the neutral tones to not feel muddy. The trick was for us to make sure the colours were getting more saturated as they were getting darker.' Calahan explains how Pixar worked to reach the beautiful use of colour in the film.

 Ratatouille is a really inspiring film colour wise as are many of the Pixar films but one of the thing I really love about it is how such variation is engineered to create a specific look. There's something about the colour palette in the above shot that just shouts 'Paris'. It goes to show the use of saturation is such a powerful tool.