I can’t recall if I’ve discussed them here before, but I’m the proud owner of a few animation cels in my personal art collection. They’re pieces of a whole and reflections of the things I loved as a kid. Their existence on my walls grows even more special with each year as cels are part of a dying art.
Cel is short for celluloid, which is the transparent sheet on which the “animated” drawings were once painted or drawn on.
When you film a bunch of these in sequence, you get an animated picture. Think of old flip books. That’s the process, dating back to the beginning of the 20th century when it was invented by Earl Hurd and John Bray in 1915.
Since then, Disney has used cel animation to create masterpieces on the big screen. Hanna-Barbera, Warner Bros, 20th Century, and many other studios, big and small, have used this process to create lasting pieces of media that have touched everyone.
The standard for frames per second in animation is 24, which means 24 cels must be created to display just one second of animation. To cut down on the work, many animations were halved in the cel count, which meant that companies would shoot a cel for two frames to keep the count down.
We’ve all grown up with this technique, so it made no difference to us whether it was 24 or 12 moving images per second. But all of those frames add up, and this is where I need to say that cels and frames are not the same.
A frame is something like a picture; it’s that one “frame” in a roll of film that repeatedly captures little movements here and there. When cycled together, it makes it look like movement. Cels can be layered on top of each other to make a frame, so two characters can move on screen independently of each other.
Depending on the production one second of movement can be 12 or 24 frames, but depending on how many characters are moving during that one second there could be one, two, or even twenty cels that make up each of those frames for that one second of movement.
All of this is to say that, at least at one time in our lives, there were a ton of animation cels out there in the world. Don’t for a minute think that they aren’t art.
Someone had to draw them, over and over and over. Then someone had to paint them repeatedly. They often started as sketches, before being drawn on the celluloid and then being painted.
Almost all of this intricate process has since been replaced by computers, but that only happened in the last 20 years or so. For the bulk of the 20th century, everything animated was created by hand and existed as tangible objects.
Animation cels have been lost to us for various reasons: budget constraints which encouraged some animation houses to wipe the cel clean and reuse it, or restrictions on storage that allowed some pieces to be discarded or destroyed. This means that real, authenticated cels do exist, from specific brokers or, as is the case with everything else, through eBay and other online marketplaces.
For those of us of a certain age, or those of us who were introduced to hand-drawn animation at a certain age, there is something a little more “alive” about the slight imperfections in the animation. To say they breathe might be a stretch, but the care of making it by hand and as smoothly as possible is something magnificent.
There is nothing wrong with computer animation. It allows smaller creators to have access to the same tools that larger studios have. That means that, as consumers, we get more cartoons. But there is a reason why we return to those old animations.
Sleeping Beauty is one of my favorite Disney animated classics. When I rewatch it, Maleficent’s Dragon is obviously amazing, but the animated brambles are a work of art all on their own. It is in those details that classic animation just stirs my soul a little more than computer animation.
Perhaps it is in the imperfections, but it could also just be taste. All in all, I’m glad to have lived in an era where the hand-drawn stuff is still accessible for viewing, and so is the independent animator’s work. Is it easier to animate on the computer? Maybe it doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day, you still need to be telling a good story, which is the most important thing there is.
Animation cels aren’t coming back. The style of animation, 2D or 3D, may wax and wane with the moon, but collecting production cels is something lost to time, unless you’re lucky.
While the style may not be gone for good, there may be a good reason we return to those favorites from long ago – because they are masterpieces of another time and an artform that has, for better or worse, moved from the page to the screen, even if there are still artists drawing them by hand again.