 The great era
of cel collecting may be ending, but the industry changes which mean fewer
cels are keeping anime in business. Those insights from animator Scott
Frazier came when he discussed the move from ink and paint to computer
animation. Painting sheets of clear celluloid and photographing the sheets
in sequence to create the illusion of movement has been the method of animating
film art for nearly a century, but it's disappearing, Frazier said. He
estimates that 60 percent of anime is made with computer programs and 40
percent comes from cel animation, and the trend is toward digital animation.
The big Toei animation studio is replacing cels with computers, Frazier
noted in illustrating the industry change. "The companies that are still
using cels are losing money until they switch." he said.
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 Computer animation
from programs such as the Retus program that Frazier represents doesn't
look like "computer animation," because it's usually not deliberately shaded
and three-dimensional in appearance. Rather, the software allows the creation
of frames in the same manner as cels, except that the computer makes the
work simpler and more flexible. Cel painting is a little like painting
by numbers, with a color assigned to each area of a frame. The computer
can make it possible to color each area at once, instead of having to paint
each of several areas with a brush. A more subtle benefit of software that
Frazier noted was the ability to use a wider palette of colors. Where anime
studios would use 50 paint colors in an episode from a typical palette
of 327 colors, computers allow 16 million colors to be used. |
 And so cels
are becoming more rare, especially since the material to make them is becoming
scarce. Frazier said that the Japanese chemical company Fuji stopped producing
cels a few years ago, and Japanese animators have to purchase the plastic
sheets from the Czech Republic. The number of cel paint suppliers also
has thinned. Fans may miss cel animation because it gave them a great way
to own a piece of the shows they loved, but Frazier won't miss the pieces
of plastic. They were delicate and easily damaged in the studio environment,
with a slight mistake ruining a cel. Electronic animation also is more
efficient than sitting over a cel with a palette of paint jars. Frazier
said he was able to paint several hundred video frames in one day where
he could paint only a couple of dozen cels in the same amount of time.
Of course, the drawback is that computer failure can wipe out hours of
work, but Frazier said the same thing happened with cels when Japanese
fans would intercept a shipment of painted cels bound for the animation
camera and steal them before the film was finished. |
