Imagine, you are an animator working in the 1950s or 1960s. You have around you various model sheets which have been provided by the characters creators and now it is your job to paint these characters onto thin plastic sheets to be used in the animation. Of course, because the sheets will be viewed from the other side of the plastic to the side you paint, it is quite a hard job - after all, you have to paint everything backwards!
When I took these animation cels to show the children, they were fascinated to learn about how animation art was created before computer animation became the norm. Although these are not cels which would have been used in an animation (they are limited edition, specially created cels for collectors), they were a fascinating insight into animation history for the children. Of course, all the children are familiar with cartoons and animations, they are after all a very popular form of children's entertainment. They even recognise the difference between modern computer animations and the older cel animations, though they could not pinpoint any differences in particular just noted that they 'look different'. Interestingly most of the children actually preferred the cel animations though again they could not pinpoint any particular reasons, just thought they looked 'better'. The children were amazed to discover how long various forms of animation have existed for, and actually asked if I could show some other, older forms. Unfortunately I do not own any original animation toys from before the age of movie animation, but watch over the coming weeks as Roy attempts to recreate some of them!
Perhaps the aspect of the films cels which most fascinated the children was the fact that each image is painted in reverse or, as the children saw it 'backwards'. Each cel is individually painted, with what would normally be the last details added inked in first. The sheet of celluloid acetate (hence the name cel - if you want to try making one yourself an overhead projection foil would work just fine) is laid over the animators original drawings and the outline is drawn in. The details are then added, a layer at a time, with the final colouring being added last. Although this sounds a long and time consuming process (and indeed a few children attempted to create their own backwards picture and discovered it was a lot harder than it sounded), this method of creating animations was actually invented in 1914 to speed up the process of animation!
Before the invention of animation cels, each image in an animation would have to be individually drawn, inked and coloured and thousands could be used in even the shortest animation. Each time the background of the image would have to be redrawn, adding to the time needed to create even the most basic animation. Before 1914 movie animations were unusual, though the ability to create them was there. The reason why animated movies were so rare was that movie theatres did not usually rent a movie, they bought it outright. A 100 foot movie (a bit over 30 metres) cost the same whether it was live action or animation, but an animated movie was more expensive and took a lot longer to make. On top of this, animations were jerky and not very high quality. They were even used to clear the theatre between real movies!
In late 1914, an animator called Earl Hurd changed all this when he came up with a new way to create animations which would be better quality, cheaper and faster to create. He invented the animation cel. Using a sheet of celluloid acetate the original drawings made by the animator would be traced and coloured then set onto a preprepared background. The background itself could be used for many different cels without needing to create a new picture for each one. This saved a huge amount of time. Cels could even be layered, one on top of the other to save more time. Then each cel or group of cels would be laid over the background, individually photographed with a movie camera, the movie would be put together and voila - an animation is born! Real animation cels are quite valuable and rare, which might surprise you since there were thousands of them made. Sadly, the celluloid used to be washed down and reused so much of the animation art was lost forever. If you would like to learn more about the history of animation cels and animation, click here.