Animation Art - What is Animation Art?

Animation Art
Animation Art is a term used to describe the art used in creating animated cartoons and features. "Animation art" most often refers to the cels (often misspelled "cells" from the old celluloid that was used in the 20s) used in creating animated cartoons and animated features like Disney's classic "Snow White And The Seven Dwarves." But strictly speaking, it can refer to any art that is based on animation - from the original artists' drawings and production cels to limited edition reproductions.

The Animation Process
To begin to understand animation art, you need to understand the classic methods of producing animated films. In it's simplest form, an artist called an "animator" draws a series of images on paper. Each image makes up a "frame" of the final film. The frames are shown to audiences at a rate of 18 to 24 frames per second to produce an illusion of motion, just as you might see in a child's flip-book. Once the animator has drawn the images on paper, the outlines are traced onto sheets of clear celluloid - hence the term "cels". Then the cels are painted to give them color. One by one, the cels are photographed in sequence to produce the final product - an animated cartoon or feature film. The cels and backgrounds were designed to be used once and then quite literally thrown away. Disney began to purposely preserve a selection of production art starting with the 1937 animated feature "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves." The Courvoisier Galleries, an art gallery in San Franciso, teamed with Disney at that time to create a series of artwork by carefully reproducing the original hand-painted backgrounds and matching them with original production cels.

Modern animation
Over the past 20 years, animation studios have begun to produce their films using computers instead of relying on people to trace drawings and paint cels. They still create the original hand-drawn images, but instead of tracing them or transferring them to cels xerographically, the drawings are scanned into computers where they can be colored and otherwise edited. Many of today's animated films, like those produced by Pixar, are produced entirely on computers, except for the concept drawings and designs which are still hand drawn, and becoming more and more collectible and valuable.

People have been collecting animation art since the late 1930's, following the release of "Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs" in 1938 when the Courvoisier Gallery of San Francisco started to sell them in special presentation set-ups with reproduction matching backgrounds. The genre peaked in the 1980's and 1990's with the rebirth of interest in Disney movies and memoribelia, thanks to films like "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" in 1988 and "The Little Mermaid" in 1989. By its very nature, of course, original animation art is a scarce commodity. Each original production cel is one-of-a-kind. While prices have slightly declined in the last 10 years, selecting a piece of quality animation art is still a significant investment for most people. So it's important to understand what makes one cel more valuable than another, and how to select a piece of animation art that's right for you.

Collecting Animation Art
The first principle of collecting animation art is to only buy pieces that please you. Whether it's just the sheer beauty of the artwork, or the fact that the image brings back happy memories, if you buy art that pleases you, you can never make a bad investment. As the poet John Keats wisely wrote, "a thing of beauty is a joy forever". Amen to that. But it is the case that not all animation art holds its original value, any more than any other commodity. Their values rise and fall in the marketplace due to many factors. So buying the art that you really like is fundamental to successful collecting.

Further, from a cold, objective, purely monetary point of view, all animation cels are not created equal. Many factors are involved, but the most important aspects include the relative popularity of the character(s) depicted amomg collectors, the integrity or completeness of the image of each character (full-figure, face forward, eyes open), whether or not the cel has been trimmed to fit the mat, and the presence of a matching background. Naturally, the physical condition of the cel is also a vital component. Cels are often fragile, and it is common to find them with fine cracks or drop-outs in the paint. Fortunately, they can often be repaired and restored to look like new again. Production art, particularly original production cels, are the most valuable because they were created by the original studio artists and actually used to make the film.