Anime Art Bargains

[sensei]

Seeing some rustles of activity in another post, I thought it might be good to generate a "show and tell" thread that would let some of us gloat a bit and maybe share some history of cel/sketch collecting. So ...

What's the biggest bargain that you remember picking up during your time of collecting?

I'll start with a lot picked up in 2006 that included these three backgrounds from Cardcaptor Sakura.

Cut 195: A pile of autumn leaves
Cut 199: a sharply tilted fall landscape
Cut 201: a dark autumn forest seen from above

They all come from the scene in Episode 68 when Sakura returns in time to meet the wizard Clow Reed and is taken through a philosophical tour of the four seasons. The most intense moment comes when fall suddenly occurs, and Clow vanishes, causing Sakura to panic and run through a landscape of bare trees and fallen leaves in search of him.

Price for the lot: 300 yen. About ninety cents per set-up (plus SMJ commission and shipping, of course).

Admittedly the first of these was left blank in the top corner and the other two were laser-print copies, which turned other collectors off. But all came with the autograph layouts and enough physical evidence to show that these laser-print backgrounds were the ones that had gone under the camera to shoot these scenes. I even found, when I got the third one, that the laser-print copy had been taped directly on top of the original watercolor, which the studio had scanned and manipulated to make it darker and more contrasty. (I later got another lot from this autumn scene later on that showed the same process: original watercolor plus manipulated laser-print copy with pinholes to show that this version had been put on the light table and used to make the scene.)

With CCS backgrounds now routinely topping $100 (as Cutiebunny observed recently), that purchase holds up pretty well these days.

Who else has a bargain to talk about?

[Fiore]

Wow that is a great bargin!! I really love these backgrounds.The colors are beautiful!<3
I doubt a bargin like this will ever happen again for any cel?XD Really curious to see the posts in thread.

[teggacat]

its real hard to come by any crazy bargains these days so when this popped up about 2 years back for ten bucks I did not hesitate!
And since I love collecting FMA, the classic Transmute stance:
http://rubberslug.s3.amazonaws.com/user ... v1sf_o.jpg
I've been collecting for a long time and I know I'm forgetting some of the old days crazy deals I snagged but this is a newer piece from my "I'm back!" collecting habits [I dropped out of cel collecting for several years but I guess it never totally leaves your system ]
And Sensei, those are AWESOME!! ahhh the good ole days.....

[sensei]

A lot of times it's a matter of knowing what you're looking at, when the seller sees just one more pencil-and-paper anime sketch for the $5 or $10 quick sale box ....



Mmmmm . . . Rozen Maiden, Episode 12, when Jun thinks Shinku is leaving him for good (I already had the genga for the adjacent cut), rough by series animation director Kumi Ishii . . .

[grEenLeaFx]

This still blows my mind today and was a dream come true for a collector. I won a huge box of sketch sets from a series I heavily collect from for only $30! There were well over a hundred sets and thousands of sketches. The series is Nazca and the auction itself did not show much, only a top view of the shipping box with sketches stacked inside vertically. I wasn't sure what to expect inside based off that or even if it really was from the series as I could not see an example. When it arrived it was better what I had hoped for and bigger than what I thought with a second layer hidden underneath. I remember Laura from celmansion was even luckier and a won a box full of sequence sets from that series over a decade before that.

[sensei]

Yeah, what you're agreeing to do is the entry-level job of sorting out and stabilizing what looks like the "discard" pile of that studio's archives. It's a daunting task identifying what the sketches cover, plus the various stages of animation that they represent, and dealing with celotape damage. I can see why some jobbers decide that a given series just isn't going to produce the degree of interest needed to justify the task of organizing a box like this. So they'd rather get something for it as is rather than waste any more time dealing with it. I bet there are boxes like these in storage facilities all over Japan.

But for someone who know and appreciates that series, it can be a treasure trove. And the work you do makes this information potentially available for the future. (And I think a time will come when primary documents from this period will be as appreciated by cultural historians as are the ephemeral woodcut prints that were so popular in Japan during the 1800s.)

[jiangdc]

I seldom got great bargains. I remember once purchased the so called "Fortune box" from YJ like 500yen，for a huge box of cel around 20kg sth like that. That's on of the worse choice I ever made. I pay a lot for shipping and none of the cel looks good to me. Even today my mom still mock me for getting this big box home

[sensei]

I've had a similar experience. Once I bid on a large lot of cels from A Tree of Palme, an anime movie that I find visually interesting (if muddled in plot). The sale price was modest, but the shipping costs were painful. And when the lot arrived, I too was deeply disappointed. The seller had "salted" the lot with a few nice cels, but virtually all of the rest were partial layers, uninteresting minor characters, and one whole book of squirming bacteria. Such is my love for anime art that I rarely throw any of it away, but I made an exception in this case. Took up too much space and reminded me of too much money I spent for nothing.

On the other hand, the "Messy Midden" Tree of Palme win (an incredibly disorganized mess of oversized items shipped in a big trash bag) brought some of the most important items I own from this film. So sometimes you roll the dice and Luck is kind.

[teggacat]

once I won an auction [YJ] for about 25 random sketches from Fullmetal Alchemist, while it wasn't a low priced bargain, it wasn't crazy overpriced either, they only showed maybe 3 of the sketches, which I liked enough to go ahead and bid, when I got it home I was quite pleased since a few of the surprise pages were really very nice with some coveted characters included, like Sensei said, sometimes you just have to roll the dice, sometimes its a bad gamble but sometimes its quite exciting!