Collecting Animation Cels

We’re moving into an almost exclusively digital world, and I can’t say I’m thrilled with it (he says from a digital blog, thereby adding to his perceived problem).

Oh sure, I appreciate the fact than an mp3 is more environmentally conservative and often clearer than printing my music onto plastics, and the chemicals in those beautiful Polaroids are so much more harmful than a quick digital snap off of a rechargeable battery, but I’m an oldschool kinda guy. I love the tactile, the handmade, the imperfect. I have nagging fears that we’re losing all of this.

Maybe that’s why I started collecting animation memorabilia from the golden age of animation – which I consider to be pretty much everything that existed before cartoons became overly reliant upon computers. It’s now actually regarded as some kind of herculean, creative feat to create an entire animation on hand-painted cels, and to eschew the computer’s clever interpolation of movement between keyframes. Draw up an intangible character on a computer screen, jiggle him around a little bit, and it’s a cartoon – but there’s nothing left over as evidence. And that kinda makes me sad.

During the olden days of animation, the visual aspect of almost any given cartoon consisted of two parts : the moving part (usually the foreground characters), and the painted backgrounds. Throughout the course of an episode of a cartoon, there would be a good handful of backgrounds that would be on the screen for extended swaths of time, and hundreds upon hundreds of hand-made paintings on clear plastic that would be laid on top of these backgrounds, one at a time, and photographed in succession.

This sheer quantity would lead you to think that an animation cel would be a really common thing to find – but unfortunately, many studios chose to save money by cleaning off these plastic sheets after they were photographed, to be re-used for subsequent animation frames. As a result, concrete artifacts from many early cartoons have been lost to re-use and recycling. A similar thing happened with those lost Doctor Who episodes, once the ostensible value of the item had run its course, ignoring the value of the actual artifact.

In terms of collecting, an original hand-painted animation cel is like owning a prop from a TV show or a movie – that existed on the screen for about 1/24th of a second. Sure, Hasbro has made Star Wars figures from characters with less screen time, but having that one artifact from one integral moment in the fourth dimension – it means something special if you’re into cartoons. I’ve even gotten into collecting Filmation original storyboard sketches – but only because they have Batman action scenes. The artifacts of creation are important.

The value of cels is fairly intuitive : cels from popular, cult, older and / or Disney films tend to fetch huge prices. In fact, the top ten most valuable cels ever sold exclusively deal with Disney properties, with a dip into Roger Rabbit’s cross-property neatness. One cel from the first full-color Mickey Mouse cartoon sold for $420,000 in 1999. ‘The Little Mermaid’ is also considered a landmark, as it was the last cel animation produced by Disney. Warner Brothers cels are also comparatively rare, as they’ve disposed of much of their archives to make room.

Conversely, the archives of many mass-production 80s cartoons are being cleared out at relatively low prices, which hover between $10 and $40 per cel, depending on the popularity and endurance of the show. Shorter lived shows will have less existing cels, and might sell for a bit more. Auctions seem to be lousy with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, He-Man, She-ra and Ghostbusters cels. Unfortunately, Thundercats cels are sparse and expensive, and I love me some Thundercats. All of these cartoons have been very iconic during my development, so the lack of value in these cels means I can scoop ‘em up easily – just one or two from the shows that were important to me.

If you’re especially lucky, your animation cel will have been preserved with the original background that it was filmed in front of, giving you a whole awesome scene to display, instead of a disembodied Egon, climbing through some mysterious, invisible space.

As we start doing everything with computers, the artifacts at the heart of animation change, as well as the creative approach to them. If you’re lucky, you can score a preproduction sketch, a painted background or a storyboard, but that’s if it’s not somehow stashed away in an artist’s notebook. Creators don’t even need to create tangible series ‘bibles’ anymore to delineate specific character features or colors, since a Photoshop copy ‘n’ paste from a master document is so much more convenient.

This isn’t to say that the quality of cartoons is on a decline. We had a few rough years as horribly substandard anime took over everything in the early 2000s, but [adult swim], Chowder and The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack are all part of this beautiful, non-pandering animation renaissance – even if some of them are reliant upon their cruel digital mistresses. So, collectors, this might just become an even hotter market as we become more and more reliant upon digital cartoons. Just keeps your hands off of my Thundercats.