Hi. I'm Jules and I think I'm in a pickle. :-(
I just bought my first cel. It was an online purchase and arrived home well-packaged. I intended to give it as a gift this Christmas. However, I have reason to believe it is fake.
I have no experience collecting cels whatsoever. Before getting this one I had never even seen one, though I had a good idea what cels look like. Hence, on inspecting the item I fell back on my knowledge of animation production techniques in order to see if it looked genuine.
The cel in question is taken from a late-70s anime series called "Anne of Green Gables" which I am not personally familiar with, but the friend for whom the gift is intended grew up with it. The main character, Anne, is featured on the cel.
After unpacking it, I made the following troubling observations:
1. The colours are beautiful and vibrant, which I think is odd considering the cel is supposedly 37 years old. Shouldn't there be a bit of fading?
2. The line-art is not xeroxed! As I'm sure many of you know, xeroxing was introduced on Walt Disney's "101 Dalmatians", and intended to cut costs by photocopying the animator's pencil drawings in black ink directly onto cels. Thus, the need for hand-inking using pens was eliminated. many other studios followed suit. In fact, I was under the impression that all anime post-1970 was xeroxed, just like the Disney productions. I was stumped then to see that my cel was hand-inked. Why would a Japanese animation studio in 1979 choose a costlier method of creating cels, especially when considering that "Anne" was a television production and probably made on a rather strict budget? By all means, hand-inking is desirable, but if it doesn't make sense within the context of the time period in which the piece was supposedly made, then it just feels fishy. I suppose anyone can grab a fine felt-tip pen and trace a pencil drawing onto cellulose acetate!
3. Now comes the big one. Almost all the line-art on the cel I received has been inked on the reverse side of the cel, that being the same side on which the paint was applied. I am quite baffled. I have always read that in both American and Japanese animated films, the outlines (drawn by hand or xeroxed) are always applied to the front of the cel, which is then flipped over and painted on the reverse side. Nowhere have I ever encountered something like this is in my books or online. In some places there are some touch-ups to the black line-art on the front of the cel, which means that my cel has most of its line-art on the back, along with the paint, with a few touch-ups on the front. Interestingly, where the coloured paint was applied over the black outlines, said outlines have almost completely faded or are in the process of fading. This is very strange.
What do you guys think? Does this sound like a fake to you?
I have contacted the eBay seller who sold me the item and he insists it is genuine, and that it was purchased from Japan.
Here is the eBay listing for the item in question. The seller is Italian and is based in Rome:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/282253893789?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
I have taken better quality photos of the item, which I will try to link to if Photobucket will stop acting crazy and allow me to upload them.
Thanks for the help. :-) I'm anxious to know the truth as the item wasn't cheap and my insides are in a bit of a knot!
