What happened to the Disney Color and Play app?

Disney Color and Play is no longer on the App Store. The app came out in February 2015: children colored Disney pages on the screen or on paper, and the camera turned the colored page into a moving 3D character. Its App Store page was still there in December 2019 and gone by April 2020. If it’s still installed on an old iPad it may open, but it can’t be downloaded again. Disney’s coloring app today is Disney Coloring World, where you color on the screen; it doesn’t scan paper pages.

What Disney Color and Play did

The app came from Disney Publishing, and the trick behind it from Disney Research. You could color in 3D “playrooms” on the screen, or color a printed page or a Disney Color and Play book with real crayons. Then you held the iPad over the page, and the character stood up from the paper in 3D, in the colors your child had used.

One Mickey page was free to print. In 2015, page packs from Frozen, Big Hero 6 and Sofia the First cost $3.99 each and single playrooms $1.99 (App Store, March 2015). Later the app was run by StoryToys. Its last version came in February 2019, and many reviews from that time say the camera often failed to recognize the page (App Store, December 2019).

Is there a new version?

Not one that scans paper. Disney Coloring World is also made by StoryToys and is free to download but needs a subscription: from $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year on the US App Store (31 October 2026). It has more than 2,000 pages, dress-up and 3D playsets, but everything is colored on the screen. The App Store description mentions no camera and no AR.

Disney Coloring World+ is the same idea in Apple Arcade, with no in-app purchases. It doesn’t scan paper pages either.

Apps that still bring a paper drawing to life

• Quiver (iPhone, iPad and Android, subscription for most pages): print and color QuiverVision’s own pages, and they rise from the paper in 3D, as Disney Color and Play did. No Disney characters, and it doesn’t work with your own drawings.
• RakugakiAR (iPhone and iPad, paid once): a doodle becomes a little creature that walks around your room in AR.
• Levende (iPhone and iPad, $1.99 once): any drawing on paper gets a skeleton and walks, jumps and dances. More below.
• Meta Animated Drawings (browser, free): upload a drawing of a person-like figure and pick a motion. The drawing goes to Meta’s servers.

Crayola’s version of the same idea is gone too: what happened to Crayola Color Alive.

When your child draws the character

I made Levende for the drawings children make themselves. There are no Disney characters and no coloring pages in it: you scan a drawing from the fridge or a notebook, and the figure is cut out, gets a skeleton and moves. If your child has drawn their own Elsa, it’s that drawing, just as it is, that walks across the table. Levende is an independent app and has nothing to do with Disney or StoryToys.

• 20 moves, from walking and jumping to dancing and boxing, and several figures at once on a stage or in AR on your table.
• Record a video with music and send it to grandma.
• Everything happens on the phone. Levende never connects to the internet and collects nothing.
• Levende costs $1.99, once. No subscription, no ads, no account.

Step by step: how to animate a drawing on iPhone or iPad.