When did Disney start shooting on negatives?

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Rumpelstiltskin
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When did Disney start shooting on negatives?

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From the book "The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney":
As an animator for Film Ad, Disney worked with cutout figures, their movable joints riveted with a device that the brother of another animator called “this little gun.” Those figures could be manipulated under the camera, their position changing each time a frame of film was shot—an arm could be raised frame by frame, say—so that when the film was projected the figure seemed to move. The films were shot as negatives and projected as if they were positive prints, which meant that everything that was supposed to be black on the screen had to be white when it was photographed, and vice versa. That method saved the expense of making a positive print of a film that would be shown only briefly and then discarded.
Which explains why none of them have survived.

(As we know, when Disney started to experiment with animation outside work, he focused on hand-drawn animation instead of cutout animation.)

From the book "Walt Disney's Missouri: The Roots of a Creative Genius"
Inspired by the work he saw being done at Kansas City Film Ad, Walt was dying to try animating on his own. He begged and cajoled his boss until Cauger finally gave him permission to borrow one of the firm's movie cameras on weekends.
With Roy's (and, presumably, Ub's) help, Walt cleared out the garage behind the Disney home and set up a crude animation studio. He experimented with photographing his drawings, trying to find just the right combination of lighting and thickness of line to produce the cleanest, best-looking image.
Among his discoveries was that animation drawings photographed with much better contrast if he used positive motion-picture film rather than the more traditional negative film, a practice he continued throughout the silent era.
If correct, I'm not sure what it means. Were the Disney cartoons shot on positive film, also called reversal film, all the way up till Steamboat Willie? And how did they make copies of their cartoons if they were shooting on positive film?

Found on this page: https://d23.com/this-member-gift-honors ... -its-time/
Walt took extra effort to infuse new levels of sophistication into his films (oftentimes at the frustration of his brother, Roy.) In 1930, the Studio began using a more delicate positive film stock, despite an added cost of $1,000 per short. And that year, intrigued by the idea of color, he asked Bill Cottrell to experiment by printing a Silly Symphony, Night (1930, pictured above), on blue film stock, attempting to produce a tinting effect to evoke a nighttime setting. Technology always seemed to be one step behind Walt Disney.
After Flowers and Trees, Disney only made a couple more black and white Silly Symphonies, but Mickey Mouse continued to be shot in black and white till 1935. It would have been interesting to know if they used the positive film on the black and white cartoons till the very end (and if other studies did the same).


Also, when they were shooting Pinocchio, they used a "newly developed type of sensitive film". From Popular Mechanics (January 1940):
For months they experimented with some way to fix up Monstro so that his big bulk took on depth, perspective and highlighting. The whale was first drawn in pencil on regular animation paper. Then the drawing was traced to a special type of colored paper and the highlights rendered in chalks. From this point, the drawing went through a tracing-dyeing-photographing process on a newly developed type of sensitive film. In this way, subtleties of highlights and perspective were obtained, as well as nuances and shades of coloring impossible with regular paints.
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