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Wizard Of Oz Colour Analysis

2005 Words9 Pages

The house stops spinning and trembling. A sudden thud and everything becomes still. Dorothy stands up, exits her room and approaches the front door. She goes for the handle, turns it, slightly spies through the door, to finally open it. A full world of bright and vivid colours displays in front of her. This is probably one of the most famous sequences in The Wizard of Oz (1939). In minute nineteen of the film, it is the moment in which the Technicolor world is revealed, merging the black and white (or sepia) world with the coloured one. Thus, depicting the change from black and white to colour film (both metaphorically and literally) there is no wonder that this film will attempt at a wide exploration of colours. In this essay I will explore the usage of colours in The Wizard of Oz, attempting to show how colours are used for different purposes and how their meanings can be changed. Rather than using a display of colour for the simple purpose of "spectacle", colours help drive the narrative and become significant "characters" and fundamental to the development of the story, rather than just mere parts of the mise-en-scene. The idea of colour as a language in which each of them help convey an idea and an …show more content…

We can see this in several objects: the smoke whenever she disappears, her sand clock counting down to Dorothy's death, the decoration in her chamber, the red details in her broomstick, the costumes of her servants, including the flying monkeys with red details in their apparel, the potion she develops for the "sleeping" poppy field (which is red again), her glass ball changing from green to red colours. The colour red is always present around her, maintaining the balance between green (her skin) and red, which needs to be maintained throughout the film. STILLS And most importantly also in red, the ruby slippers, which will link her to

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