My name is Benoit, and I'm a fellow cel and anime-related-art collector. I'm French, but I've been living in Montréal for the past 5 years.
I started collecting in 2009, when I bought my very first DBZ douga at the Japan-Expo, on Takamura Store booth. Since then I gathered a small collection, nothing too fancy or high end, just memorabilia from my favorite animes from the 90's
I am an artist myself, working as background designer in the animation industry, mainly 3D feature films. (The Minions, Despicable Me, Sing, The Grinch, Over the Moon...)
I do not have a Rubberslug gallery as I find the website very old and unpractical, so I'm mainly sharing my pieces through a Google Photo gallery.
Un débutant! Un débutant! Sortez les bananes du placard!
Welcome to Anime-Beta. Though a less exuberant crew than in the past, you'll find many avid collectors and admirers of your precious collection. And your experience in new-style animation makes you a valuable addition to the forum. Some of us (myself included) look back to the "superflat" tradition of animation when actual painted sheets were layered on actual watercolor paintings to create the shows we loved. Recently I saw that Madhouse is sticking to this older tradition in Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Cards. Much to my surprise, actual watercolor paintings were executed and used in this series, and I can see from the paper that comes with them (copies alas) that the studio did a lot of the prep. work in the old pencil-and-paper way.
Not that CGI backgrounding and animation lacks a human dimension, but too often it does not leave a paper trail for us still-eager collectors. So your experience on this front will be interesting to learn.
You'll see I have more dougas/gengas than cels, but I tend to find them more interesting. That's where the true art reside in my opinion, as it is the work of an animator, creating something from scratch. Also, it's cheaper and will last much longer in good shape than cels :p
I'm also trying to get more nice backgrounds from shows I like, but it's not an easy task.
The last picture is one of my most valuable one; a Tarzan that Glen Keane made for me 2 years ago, after a few months working on his movie "Over the Moon". That guy is truly a wonderfull person that I feel lucky to have met (although it was only on zoom :p )
Sensei, I do feel what you say about modern animation not leaving any physical traces... I could still work on paper if I wanted, but the process has been made much smoother by working directly on photoshop... There's still some rough sketches done on paper sometimes to share ideas, but refined ones are a rarity. That's only talking about european/american animation movies though. Japan is using digital more and more, but shows such as Kill la Kill still had traditionnaly painted backgrounds, and that was only a few years ago (Same for Naruto Shippuden)
If you are interested in what I do, you can find most of my work here
I'm reminded of when I tried to get an Escaflowne cel, but never got one. The ones I wanted always sold out too fast, were too expensive or I got outbid on. What was the name of that place...Anime Taro?...where the cels would disappear in front of your face within two minutes of the update.
I never got any Lodoss cels either, but they are nice to see. At a certain point I just gave up and switched to shows that were less popular and easier to get. I have a fondness for the anime I watched in the first year after I first started watching anime regularly. They're very nostalgic.
Thank you for the links and further insights, Benoit. Your collection is a vivid one and worth browsing in. Like you, though, I found myself drawn to the original backgrounds, which are themselves often interesting and moody artworks in their own rights. I've certainly moved strongly from cel-based art to sketchwork in the last ten years. Cels are of course the more vibrant and immediately striking art objects, and they are "a piece of the action," a way of physically "owning" part of a film or series that you enjoy. It is a peculiar pleasure to take out a DVD or pull up a video file and page through a scene frame by frame, until you find that one, the exact match on the screen to the art object you've just unpacked from a box and laid on the desk beside the screen.
But increasingly I agree that cels are still piece work that some poor underpaid soul did for a pittance, essentially a "paint by numbers" job rather than an original art work. (And yet ... and yet ...)
It is intellectually more charged to get a lot of sketches working out a particular cut or scene and develop a sense for how the art was worked up, stage by stage, from often very rudimentary drawings to amazingly detailed, elegant keyframes and inbetweeners. One gets a sense for individual animators and their ideosyncracies. One might be obsessively clean and detail-oriented, erasing false starts so often that the paper begins to distort under the pressure. Another starts with rough geometric patterns, then works them up into images, layer by layer, in different colored pencils, so that the final image visibly emerges out of a flurry of seemingly random pencil scratches.
The drawback of collecting and displaying this type of art, however, is that it really demands commentary to explain the relationship among sketches and the significance of odd or distinctive details. So I've found Rubberslug's format invaluable as it allows me to put this commentary directly under the scan of the sketch. Yes, I'm aware of its drawbacks as an online platform and the possibility that its obsolescence might not make it visible much longer. But for the moment it is really unexcelled in its ability to present both images and information about their contexts. (True, many curators take too little advantage of this advantage.)
Anyhow, yes, I see your point here, and also enjoyed looking at your professional artwork, particularly the work you did for The Grinch, where the style of the artwork honors the eccentricities of Dr. Seuss's original and is also very original in a quirky way. That's an aspect of production art that doesn't get preserved often, perhaps only as part of the "Settings" (Settei) that are available only in photocopy form. I managed to pick up a few pencil-on-paper settei drawings for Powerpuff Girls Z and Sasami: Magical Girls Club, and a couple of what seem to be conceptual background art for Magic Knight Rayearth. But as you say this side of anime art is very, very difficult to find.
Keropi, I remember the ferocious scrabbles over artwork at the turn of the last century, when Escaflowne (and CCS) were "the next new thing" and original artwork of amazing quality was selling very cheaply on dealers' sites and on auction sites. I lost a lot of these scrabbles, but won a few, and stayed long enough to pick up some even nicer pieces when their original owners dispersed their collections. That was the dubious joy of those days: there was so much good stuff available that it was tempting to overextend one's budget for a series of "wishlist" items, and it was easy to get oneself into serious financial straits as a result. It wasn't "addiction," as it was often termed, but it was risky.
I remember having the cash that I had available for one wishlist up for auction in an envelope under the keyboard as I was bidding. At one point, I took it out and counted it one more time to make sure that I did have the wherewithal to raise my bid one last time. And I did, and I won the item, one of the big stars of my collection, and I used the cash in the usual way to buy a US Postal Order to send to my deputy service, PayPal being an untested newbie in those days.
An unruly but enjoyable activity then, and still enjoyable now two decades later, though in different ways.
Keropi wrote: ↑Thu Nov 18, 2021 9:40 pm
Nice artwork!
I'm reminded of when I tried to get an Escaflowne cel, but never got one. The ones I wanted always sold out too fast, were too expensive or I got outbid on. What was the name of that place...Anime Taro?...where the cels would disappear in front of your face within two minutes of the update.
I never got any Lodoss cels either, but they are nice to see. At a certain point I just gave up and switched to shows that were less popular and easier to get. I have a fondness for the anime I watched in the first year after I first started watching anime regularly. They're very nostalgic.
I got all my Escaflowne cels for pretty cheap to be honest. The most expensive one (beside the oversize background) was the beautifull close-up on Van's face from episode 2, and it was 10 or 12k yens at Apple Symphony in Nakano. All the others where between 40 and 80 bucks. The Escaflowne douga from the OP was a bit more expensive though.
My full setup from Lodoss is my most expensive piece, coming from Takamura Store (around 400 bucks). But all the gengas/shuusei were really inexpensive, mostly coming from silvrdrago on ebay. He just re-listed some yesterday by the way
I'd love more cels from that show, but the prices are stupidly expensive now.
Concerning the previous discussion of paper-based vs. tablet-based animation work, I recently found this interesting article online that discusses the Japanese animation situation in some detail:
The interviewer begins by noting that Morimoto has a drawing tablet next to his desk, but is working in pencil on one of those familiar paper sheets with registration holes punched into the top. The animator replies simply, "At the time of copyright, I draw on an LCD tablet, but I don't usually use it. Most of my usual animation work is paper."
[The piece was originally published in Japanese and has been translated with the help of an online Japanese/English engine. "Copyright," I know, is the Engrish translation for "hanken," so what Morimoto is saying is that when he does the fine work needed for hankens designed for advertising, covers of DVDs. etc., he uses a tablet, but that the everyday job of animating the show itself is still done in the old pencil-on-paper way.]
There's an extensive discussion of how slowly CGI animation is being integrated into anime, and the economic reasons for this. While the Engrishy quality of the translation is annoying, if you remember that "original" translates genga and "video" translates douga, the info is pretty clear and very informative.
Sidelight: I found this piece because I own a number of roughs and shuuseis by Morimoto, done for Rozen Maiden Zuruckspulen (Studio Deen, 2013), for which he shared the role of chief animation director with Kyuta Sakai, best known as the character designer and chief animation director for Higurashi aka When They Cry . Morimoto has also had a number of high-context assignments, notably as chief animation director for the maho shoujo ... er.... maho shonen spoof series Is this a Zombie?
Small kind of update to my collection: no new pieces, but the définitive proof that all my shusei genga from Lodoss (the ones on pink paper only) where all drawn by Nobuteru Yuki himself!
It could be either him or Yutaka Minowa, but I got confirmation that mine are all Yuki's, by none other than Nobuteru himself
Which is pretty awesome for me, as a huuuuuge fan of his work!
Congratulations! Having a nice piece of animation art is a joy, but it is finer still when you have so firm a provenance and can firmly attribute a sketch to an eminent artist like Nobuteru Yuki.
