Animation Cels

Hello lovely princesses Shannon and Eva!

 

Happy Thursday from New Jersey!  Guess what?  THE SUN IS SHINING HERE TODAY!  woo-hoo! 

 

I am still madly busy with finance things, but this week I thought I'd show you the world's most expensive animation cell.  Now, I should note, that expensive art isn't always GOOD art.  Matter of fact, a lot of REALLY expensive art is pretty crappy.  But in this case, at least there's a reason for the expense.

 

Back in the days before computers, Animation cels (short for celluloid, even though by the time this piece came around they were made out of cellulose acetate …because celluloid had a nasty habit of catching on fire!) were these transparent sheets that cartoons were painted on. Then the see through sheet (or sheets) was laid on top of a painting of a background scene.  That way they could keep the background the same and not have to repaint it in each frame, but keep the characters on the scene moving around.  It takes thousands and thousands of cels to create even a very short cartoon; in most animation there are 24 frames in every second of film!

 

As an example, here are six frames of a red ball – see how it's in a slightly different position in each one?  You could create a cel of each of those balls, and then put one background behind it, and if you repeated them over and over very fast, you'd see the red ball bouncing up and down in front of your background!

 

 

(Before cel animation existed, you had to use a flip book to make things move – remind me next time I see you to show you how to make one – they're fun!! Your dad and I used to take little notepads that Grampie would bring home from work and turn them into flipbooks of little stick figure people doing things.)

 

Fun fact!  The Little Mermaid was the last movie made using cel animation process!

 

So the most expensive cel that I could find is a handpainted one  from a Disney cartoon, 1935′s "The Band Concert" in which Mickey attempts to conduct Goofy and other characters in a rousing performance of "The William Tell Overture." There's a wind storm, a crazy bee, & Donald Duck keeps playing the wrong song, so it's a funny cartoon. This cel is the only production cel in existence to feature Mickey and the full band, and this cartoon was the very first one done in color, so it's pretty special!  It sold in 1999 for $420,000.  That's a lot of money!

 

What's interesting to me is that although this is one of the most famous animation cels ever, and even though I tried really hard to find out, no one knows who actually painted it – I guess because teams of animators would work on each project.

 

In any case, here it is, I hope I didn't bore you too much with all the info!

Know that I love  you and think that you're awesome.

Hugs and kisses,

Auntie Paula

XOXOXOXOXO