One thing I'd always regretted was that someone, I'd assumed a prior owner, had tried to touch up the fading lines in the bottom left quadrant, directly under the Princess's eye.
The touch was sloppy, the ink line too broad for the design, and the work made the whole part of the cel look sloppy. Also, the cel was dirty, and while I gave it a gentle wipe, a stubborn dot (glue? paint?) on the right hair strand (just opposite the smaller jewel on her forehead) would not budge.
My DVDs from MKR season 1 were legit ones, but old technology, hard to play, impossible to navigate easily. So while I knew where this cel appears, I'd never gotten around to doing the screencapping. Today I hunted down the scene, carefully worked up to this image, frame by paused frame, and ....
Surprise, surprise:
The clumsy retouching had been done by the studio before the cel went under the camera, not after. And there's that stubborn spot, already there on the face of the cel, preserved for posterity on a thousand, thousand copies of this episode.
The cel is verifiably line-faded past what the screencap shows, but it looks to me as if the lines were already soft when the cels were delivered. It's normal for studios to outsource this painting job, often to operations in China, Korea, Singapore, etc. I wonder now if this batch didn't sit in a hot truck or ship container or cardboard box on a tarmac strip for a long time on a sunny day. In any case, this is not the only MKR cel I have that was touched up prior to its moment under the camera.
Just an interesting observation that I thought I'd share. One never knows the entire story of what the art we collect had to go through on its wayward path to our cel books.
