Aren't these copies?

[sensei]

It does make a difference if the copies were actually used in studio work, rather than being simply Kinko's laser prints of something a collector owns but doesn't want to sell.

My Mushishi art boards are among my most cherished possessions. They are very high quality color copies, so good that it takes an 8x loupe and a good light to resolve the art into dots. And they came heavily annotated by a studio artist who added more foliage in the backgrounds (most of the action takes place in the woods) and very carefully divided the image into "books" (i.e., separately animated CGI layers). As the additions show up in the final production, I assume that the artist was the series art director or a close associate working under his supervision. (The series won a Japanese Emmy for artistic achievement.)

When I got these, I was uncertain whether they were copies or not, and it took about a week of very careful examination and background research before I was sure I knew what they were. I could easily see that someone could buy a similar lot, get them, say, "Oh, these are copies, I've been cheated." And that would seriously misunderstand the place these sheets had in the creation of a great anime.

In this age "copy" [コピ] certainly doesn't mean "not authentic." It just means "copy."

[Keropi]

Glad to hear there's a happy ending to this story.

[klet]

By the way, to put it simply from what I saw on earlier posts; "ï¼—ï¼–æžš = 76 pieces/sheets". "æžš" is piece/sheet, can be used for an object as well as on papers.

Not just any object. It has to be a flat, thin object. For instance, they also use "æžš" for CDs. You couldn't use it for like, a book or a computer, though.