But stuff does come up from time to time, and in surprising ways. In negotiating the purchase of a sketch set for a CGI series that I collect, a collector mentioned that she also had three sketches from Princess Tutu that she was willing to sell. Well -- Tutu art is vanishingly rare, so any item would be well worth having, and so I bought them on the spot without thinking about it much. Then, in my usual way, I whiled away the time waiting for them to arrive by locating the cuts from which them came (not hard, for virtually all the sketchwork that has showed up for sale comes from Episodes 25 or 26, and both episodes are worth watching again and again). And of course looking at the rather small scans of the items I'd bought.
I kept looking at the sequence number --"A1"--on one of the sketches, which was on light yellow paper, indicating the work of a senior animator, likely the episode's animation director, or this artist's supervisor, the senior animation director. There was nothing odd or dramatic about the way this was written -- but animators do this labeling is many different ways, making the "A" in one stroke, or two, or three, and circling the letter and number, or maybe just the number, or maybe not circling it at all, or maybe not writing the sequence number on the sketch at all. This one seemed, if not odd, at least distinctive, and I remembered a recent case in which I'd identified a certain animator by the very characteristic way in which that person had circled a "1" in "A1," very tightly, all in one stroke. Like in this sketch. The series was Asatte no Houkou and the animator was Ikuko Itoh.
OK, OK, I thought. This is crazy. Yes, Itoh-sama did a lot of supervising work on AnH. What evidence do I have that she did the same on Princess Tutu? And two other folks were credited as episode animation directors for Ep. 25.
But ... other folks were credited as episode animation directors in AnH and Itoh still insisted on reviewing their roughs and even their genga shuuseis, sometimes even replacing the whole keyframe at the last moment with an image of her own.
No, no, if she'd done that, she'd have written "shuusei" on the sketch, which she did in an easily identifiable way that looked like "T⅔" -- and no such thing on this sketch. Yes, yes, a nice sketch -- really very nice in fact -- but the work of a talented underling, not Itou-sama. What are the chances that any work this animator did on Tutu ever got out of the studio?
But, dang it, when I got the sketch, that distinctive "A1" really was darned close to those I had firmly attributed to Itou in AnH. And then something told me to check another RS gallery that I knew had some Tutu sketchwork. And . . .
Well, the sketch set from this cut had been broken up when it first went onto the market. SAZEN, a devoted Tutuphile with considerable resources, had gathered up a lot of this material when it first appeared on Yahoo Japan. And there, on the second page of his sketchwork gallery, was the genga that went with one of my sketches. And in the thumbnail . . .
If you're a fan of Tutu (on which I've written an erudite academic essay for a collection of academic folkloristic essays), or of Ikuko Itou, or just interested in the various ways in which you can identify the artists of certain very impressive animation sketches, you can learn the rest in the description of my new Princess Tutu item, uploaded today with the other two interesting additions to this gallery.
Let's just say that sometimes the twists of animation art collection can really, totally surprise you.
