Coloring in the World

The world is but a canvas to our imagination... and this giant paintbrush.

When the setting lacks color with everything as either white, black, or in-between, the narrative may give someone the task of fixing it by giving it loads of colors to create an Amazing Technicolor World. Plots involving this trope will have the main protagonists involved attempt to turn their monochromatic setting into a more vibrant, colorful world with all the colors of the rainbow and more. This also makes the trope a way to defy Deliberately Monochrome. This situation can also involve restoring color to a formerly colorful world that has lost its color for any reason, whether by some event that took away color from the place or a bad guy who is trying to invert this trope. Can also apply if protecting said colors from anything actively threatening said colors.

Typically, the setting at the beginning will be colored in grayscale, and be dull, boring, bleak, or worse. As the protagonists restore or bring in color, whether by giving its inhabitants the ability to see color, or literally coloring the world in, the other characters will find themselves happier with more color around than they were before, and the world itself may find itself in a better condition for it. The general idea presented by this trope is that polychromatic settings are better places to be in than monochromatic settings.

Just because the people would like the world better overall with more colors than less, that doesn't mean the protagonists attempting to bring color in will go unopposed. While not necessarily part of the trope, there may be antagonists or bad guys that may attempt to stop or reverse the spread of color, usually because they oppose color itself, the grayscale world fits with how oppressive they are, or like the simple colorless aesthetic. Such individuals may be represented by the Grayscale of Evil if they are associated with attempting to either defy this trope or try to make the world literally black and white. In cases where the good guys' lands are colorful and the bad guys' lands are colorless, this trope might intersect with Villainous Badland, Heroic Arcadia should the heroes be literally improving the badlands by granting it color.

Sub-Trope of Monochrome to Color, which is about general shifts from monochromatic settings to colored settings, including mainly stylistic or symbolic changes, even if the act of giving the world color isn't a significant part of the narrative. If the restoration of color is related to the flow of time, it's a Colour-Coded Timestop. Compare to Splash of Color, which is about general exceptions of distinctly colorful entities in an otherwise monochrome setting. Not to be mistaken with Colorization, which is about adapting a colorless work to give it color. Also compare to Painting the Frost on Windows, which is about giving nature and its seasons their color and theming, as well as Fill It with Flowers, for a similar heroic goal of making a drab place aesthetically beautiful.

Also compare to Gloomy Gray, Gray Is Useless and No Power, No Color, which also signify colorlessness or grayness as bad or detrimental. Not the same as Painting the Medium.

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Examples:

Fan Works

• Land of No Color: The protagonists of this work have been transported into the Rainbellian, the source of rainbows in every dimension. However, much of the place is colorless because of attacks from a terrorist faction known as "The Vendetta". On top of fending off the Vendetta, the heroes must seek out the Fusion Orbs to return color to the lands of Rainbellian.
• Pony POV Series: A small-scale example occurs in the Dark World arc. After Rainbow Dash is purified of her Discording, she falls into a healing coma and her mind goes to a Happy Place where she becomes a filly again and plays with her childhood friends. On the surface of the mental playground is a giant line drawing of herself which she fills in with colorful chalk. When she finishes coloring the whole thing, that is symbolic of her being ready to wake up and go help her friends save the world.

Film — Animation

• Yellow Submarine: The setting of Pepperland is initially an Amazing Technicolor World, but when it gets taken over by the Blue Meanies, the land becomes gray and gloomy, and denizens shot at by the Blue Meanies' arrows become gray and motionless. The main protagonists eventually liberate Pepperland from the Blue Meanies and return its color in the process.

Film — Live-Action

• Pleasantville: The main protagonists Jennifer and David get trapped in the black-and-white show of Pleasantville, which seems to be a pleasant place as the name implies at first, but it turns out the inhabitants have their own sorts of hidden issues and are stuck in a drab, formulaic lifestyle. Gradually, the protagonists cause color to spread throughout the place via growing out of their comfort zones and confronting their inner turmoil.

Literature

• The Giver: The book's main society, The Community, has removed everyone's ability to see color (in addition to their emotional memories of the past) via genetic engineering. As the main protagonist, Jonas, who is unlike many others, able to see the color red at first, experiences more memories, he gradually regains the ability to see and experience all colors in the world in general. His ultimate plan is to leave the city, forcing all the memories — and with them, color — to return to the populace.
• The Great Blueness and Other Predicaments tells of a time called The Great Grayness because the only colors in the world are black, white, and grey. A wizard accidentally invents the color blue, and soon everything in the world is blue, leading to The Great Blueness. People find all this blue too sad, so the Wizard invents yellow. This leads to The Great Yellowness, which everyone finds to be too bright and blinding. Next the Wizard invents red. This leads to the Great Redness, which puts everyone in a terrible temper. The Wizard, trying to invent a new color, accidentally lets the pots of blue, yellow, and red overflow, which mix together, creating new colors. At last the Wizard realizes that the solution is to have a variety of colors in the world.
• Hitherby Dragons: In Rainbow Noir, Rainbow Land has become the grim, colorless Shadow City, a place where people will kill each other and girls will sell their bodies to get even a little bit of color. Wisp could restore the city's color, but she no longer believes in her own magic because the sprites told her she was an Artificial Human with no real magic to keep her from getting too powerful. When Twink/Terrence summons her to defeat Nihilism Bear with her rainbow power, she does so, but realizes that she was a real person all along and asserts her own power by restoring color to Shadow City.
• In Journey to the Dream Land, Evil Sorcerer Klingzor, ruling over a realm of nightmares and drug-induced hallucinations, attempts to steal the colors from the pure and vibrant Dream Land, hoping to snare more people if his realm has more of true beauty in it. He partly succeeds, and a good deal of the outskirts of the Dream Land turns monochrome, so one of the heroes' goals in defeating him is bringing the colors back again. However, Klingzor's land doesn't become a genuine example of the trope, since the colors don't adjust to it well and look like ugly clots of half-dried paint.
• The Phantom Tollbooth: Played with. In the dimension the tollbooth leads to, colour is created from an orchestra that is conducted by a man named Chroma the Great. When Milo tries to sub for Chroma, this results in a week going by supernaturally quickly (due to the orchestra colouring the sky to day and night too quickly) and everything being the wrong colour. When Milo stops the orchestra, he unintentionally inverts the trope, turning everything colorless.

Live-Action TV

• The Aunty Jack Show: To celebrate the introduction of color to Australian television in 1975, the cast reunited for a skit in which Aunty Jack, Thin Arthur, and Kid Eager try in vain to stop the "color monster" from invading Wollongong. As the "color monster" floods their house, the scene gradually fills with color.

Pinball

• Foo Fighters (2023): The main plot is about the titular band taking on The Overlord who is mind-controlling people through specialized helmets, turning them into Gloomy Gray (in both skin and clothing) servants known as The Reformatted. The protagonists utilize The Power of Rock to liberate them and bring color back to their lives both literally and figuratively.

Video Games

• Alekon: Fictions in Dream's Doorstep have been rendered colourless by Dullness. To restore them, you need to take a picture of that Fiction somewhere in the Realm of Fiction, which will give it back its colour and liveliness.
• Chicory: A Colorful Tale: The game starts with a color wipe causing all of the color from the setting to disappear. In the beginning of the game, you become the new wielder, able to use a magic brush to color in the world as you explore it, to return the world to its colored state as is the duty of wielders of The Brush in general and to find out what caused the color wipe.
• Colour My Series: The game features a stick-man protagonist who brings and spreads color into the dystopian Black and White City, gradually turning it into a better place.
• Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time: The trope becomes the main gimmick of the Salty Wharf's N. Verted Level, which has all the level's color removed, but every time Crash and Coco use their spin attack, paint will seemingly fly off them and color in more of the level as the player goes, letting the player be able to color in the level to their liking.
• de Blob: The titular Blob colors the surfaces he travels on as he leads a Color Revolution against the I.N.K.T. Corporation, led by Comrade Black who wants to not only invade Chroma City and enslaving the Raydians within, but to eradicate color in general.
• Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey: Snow White’s world is built around color which was removed and you have to return it back.
• Dora Saves The Crystal Kingdom is about Dora's quest to retrieve the magic crystals that provide the titular kingdom with its colors. For each crystal that she collects, she can use it to color the greying kingdom, even by applying the color directly to larger objects like a crayon.
• Drawn To Life The Next Chapter: The world's color is getting drained by Wilfre, and the Creator sets the hero out to stop him and bring the color back.
• Kirby and the Rainbow Curse: At the beginning of the game, Dream Land gets its color drained, and as a result, it becomes more lifeless as a result, which leads to Kirby and Elline going on an adventure to restore color to the world.
• Ōkami: The world has been engulfed in a literal darkness of gloom and despair. It comes down to Amaterasu to use her Celestial Brush to bring light and color back to Nippon.
• Paper Mario: Color Splash: Mario goes to Prism Island when he learns about a Toad who has lost his color, and has found that the entire island has been drained in color, so Mario sets out to find the culprit and bring back color to Prism Island.
• The Saboteur has areas that are Oppressed, where the people of WWII France are under the boot of the Nazi regime. Freeing them by completing certain missions, destroying enough of German war material, and inspiring the people will bring back color to the world.
• Sonic Generations has the White Space, manifested via the Time Eater disrupting the timeline and having both Classic and Modern Sonic interact. The White Space is so named because all the entrances to the level hubs are colored completely white and look lifeless, at least until the Sonics complete the levels and restore color.
• ULTRAKILL: 7-1, the first level of the Violence Layer of Hell, is a pitch white mausoleum with a book at the beginning which tells you to "TAKE UP YOUR BRUSH AND PAINT THE WORLD R E D." Naturally, considering that the game consists of Ludicrous Gibs aplenty, every encounter will end with every surface painted with the blood of your enemies, which visually stands out the most out of every Layer in the game.

Web Animation

• The online short "Orange" shows a monochrome world where an orange man is forced to paint himself gray to fit in. When it rains and washes off the paint, he finds that he can transmit the color to the rest of the citizens, making the world fully colored and bringing across a message about individuality.
• Showvember: In "Okay What About The Hill, Bill?" the challenge is to paint the world's blank white background to give it some color.

Webcomics

• Buni: The titular rabbit decides one day to bring Technicolor to the drab black-and-white world of the bears. Unfortunately, instead of causing them to become joyfully rapturous from the sight, they instead all Go Mad from the Revelation, with the final panel having a Hazmat team busily "disinfecting" the entire scene of all those toxic colors.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: An "Explained" SCP known as SCP-8900-EX was an anomaly that the titular organization failed to contain, and its effects are implied to be the very reason we see color as it is today. Before SCP-8900-EX spread its influence through colored photographs and more, the world used to be more black-and-white. The SCP Foundation had to utilize a world-scale variant of Laser-Guided Amnesia to make people think the way color is today was always like that.

Western Animation

• In the The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Faith," Alan loses his faith in mankind, and the world becomes gray. After Gumball and Darwin cheer him up with a song, the color returns to the world.
• Care Bears: In the 1980s series, on one occasion the protagonists find themselves in Drab City, which is gloomy and colorless, and the denizens there equally as drained of energy. The Care Bears also slowly get affected by the cause of Drab City's colorlessness. The cause ends up being some strange meteor, and when it is eliminated, the color and liveliness returns to the city.
• The Fimbles: One of Roly Mo's stories concerns a world where colour comes from the Painting Elves, with an elf dedicated to each color and named accordingly. For example, the color yellow is handled by the Yellow Elf, green is handled by the Green Elf, etc.
• Gravity Falls: Parodied in the short Mabel's Guide to Color, where Mabel claims the world was in black and white until a wizard named Crandalf the Fabulous invented it during the Great Depression of all times.
• My Little Pony: Rainbow Roadtrip: Rainbow Dash and the other members of the Mane 6 are asked to return colours back to the town of Hope Hollow, since Sunny Skies' modifications to the Rainbow Generator had seemingly accidentally drained the ponies of their colours. They eventually manage to return colour to the town by realising that it wasn't actually the Generator that removed the magic, but rather hopelessness magic created by ponies not showing community with each other and losing hope, which is resolved through the excitement of setting up the Rainbow Festival.
• Pink Panther and Pals: "A Pinker Tomorrow" has the Pink Panther waking up in a black-and-white future controlled by an evil dog. Since he's the only thing left with any color, he has the power to bring it back, and does so by hooking himself up to the villain's power source so he can spread color on a large scale.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): Inverted with Mr. Mime from the episode Mime For A Change. The friendly Rainbow the Clown inadvertently turned evil due to an accident with bleach turned him into the black-and-white Mr. Mime, who attempts to drain the color around him to make it as colorless as he is, but Bubbles via a song restores her friends, the city, and even Mr. Mime himself back into a colorful state.
• Rainbow Brite: The titular protagonist and her Color Kid band all have to work together to keep and retain the colors of the world, while Murky Dismal attempts to take all the color away. The Origins Episode combines this trope with the exact opposite of a Sugar Apocalypse, where Rainbow Land is transformed from a gloomy hellscape to a colorful and vibrant paradise.
• To Spring is the first cartoon credited to Bill Hanna while working at Harmon-Ising Studios. An underground gnome awakens to a clock chiming in the vernal equinox. This fellow rouses his comrades, whereupon they mine lodes of color from the earth, boil it in cauldrons, then pump the colorful fluid through tubing into the surface world, which is still in the grip of a monochrome winter. Thus begins a push-o'-war contest between the gnomes that want springtime color in the world, and fierce winter that aims to keep the world gaunt and drab.

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