When I was writing a recent article called “A Look At Early Japanese Animation“, I briefly mentioned animation cels and it occurred to me that there may be people who might be unfamiliar with what animation cels are since I’ve yet to write an article covering the topic. Therefore, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at what animation cels are, how they were used in the animation process and their surprising value to collectors.
First, it’s important to note that the term “Cel” is shorthand for celluloid and refers to the material that animation was drawn onto before the advent of digital animation. This material is made from cellulose, nitrogen-based chemical compounds and other additives to form a sheet of thin and flexible plastic. Drawings would be drawn on various cels and then these would be laid atop each other over a background to create the complete image. A light is placed behind these cels and a picture is then taken. By running these images together at a framerate, for instance 24 frames per second, you create the illusion of movement.
As you can imagine, this process is very labour-intensive and requires an ungodly amount of animation cels to produce content. To give some examples, Akira had approximately 160,000 cels, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has 119,500 frames of animation and even American TV animation typically contains around 30,000 frames.
Since the late 1980s, the animation industry has slowly shed the use of animation cels for digital animation. A scene from Disney’s The Little Mermaid was entirely animated on a computer and, after that, all Disney animated movies began to be entirely animated on a computer. Other companies in the animation industry quickly followed suit which includes the anime industry.
However, just because animation cels are no longer produced doesn’t mean that they’ve been completely relegated to history. Animation cels have been increasing in popularity as a collector’s item and it’s not uncommon to see these cels valued in the tens of thousands. Of course, this value is determined by the popularity of the original work and there are plenty of animation cels that are sold at relatively low prices.
I’ve always been tempted by the idea of collecting animation cels but I always think of the opportunity cost of purchasing these cels and my enthusiasm quickly deflates. However, I continue to admire these cels and all of the effort that went into producing these wonderful works of art. Let me know your thoughts on animation cels and their surprising value, what you think of the process, their history, what you think of collecting cels, whether you’ve collected any and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk and amazon.com for all of your needs!