When Disneyland opened in 1955, a little booth in the theme park sold animation cels from Walt Disney cartoons and features for one dollar each.
In the Disney studios these inked and painted drawings on clear cellulose acetate, usually about 10 by 12 inches, were photographed against a painted background; the shrunken images on film were projected 24 per second to create the illusion of movement.
In the marketplace of images, however, it has been anything but shrinkage. Some 35 years after they were practically being given away, one cel and background from the 1951 animated film “Alice in Wonderland” was sold at auction for $79,200. And a rare black-and-white cel plus its background from the 1934 short “Orphan’s Benefit” was bought by a St.
Louis gallery for almost half a million dollars.
Since that sale in 1989 the art market has collapsed-but not for animation art, which has continued to, at the very least, hold steady and at best grow by leaps and bounds. More people are discovering that they can own a segment, however fractional, of a much-loved film such as “The Jungle Book” or “Pinocchio” or a cartoon from Disney or Warner Brothers or Hanna-Barbera.
According to Amanda Deitsch, senior cataloger and animation specialist for Sotheby’s in New York (where an October sale of some 250 lots from “Beauty and the Beast” brought in $1.25 million): “It’s a field that’s really attracting new collectors constantly and because of that, we’re seeing a solid buying base being established.
“All of a sudden it’s an area that’s getting a great deal more exposure. It’s attracted quite a lot of press because it’s perceived as a very new area of collecting, and a lot of new galleries are opening up across the country.”
This will not come as news to Jim Lentz, owner of Stay Tooned gallery in Lake Forest. “The past year has been nothing short of sensational,” he said. “We opened our second gallery in May, and we will open our third gallery Feb. 1 in Minneapolis. We’ve seen the business do nothing but grow.”
But the curious nature of animation art-a product at once corporate and creative that affords only a glimpse of the real art, the projected, moving image-has meant growing pains, and some of those hurting are would-be collectors. Antiques and Collecting magazine recently warned that despite its good track record, animation art “is an area that has proven itself subject to manipulation, representational abuse and shifting nostalgia trends. It is not the place for the casual collector.”
Much of what is being sold these days, although not at auction, is in fact not animation and only marginally art. Disney, Warner Brothers and others, recognizing public demand as well as the potential to make more money off its lovable creations, have taken to marketing a number of variations on the animation process involving more or less of the artist’s hand.
For instance, Disney offers hand-inked and painted limited editions of classic moments from its films, made by tracing an animation drawing onto acetate and combining it with a background. The cel technique reproduces the actual process, although the product is not the original artwork. (Other, less valuable, processes include serigraph cels and xerographic-line cels. An accompanying story explains these in detail.)
Lentz and Deitsch point out that many collectors of original animation art have started out by buying such limited editions, but Deitsch cautions that there is no secondary, or resale, market for them. Only original animation art is sold at auction.
Said Deitsch, “One of the things that’s fun about the limited editions, which are usually far less expensive than a piece of production art, is that often it enables someone to possess an image they’d be unable to purchase if it were the real thing. It’s important that people do understand what they’re buying.”
As the interest in animation has widened to take in everything from Bugs Bunny to “The Simpsons,” said Lentz, “the public has to be very cognizant that there is no free lunch, and they should really learn about what they’re looking at before they buy.
“I think you’ll soon see a shakeout: Any time a commodity gets hot every Tom, Dick and Harry want to put it on their walls, so a lot of garbage is produced and a lot of galleries that know nothing about animation rush to put it up. I’ve even seen it on the Home Shopping Network-99 dollars, get your Fat Albert cel! Production cels from some pretty bad 1970s TV shows pop up.”
Lentz recently brought Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of Disney’s “nine old men” (as Walt referred to the head animators of the studio’s golden age), to his gallery for a discussion of animation. Thomas and Johnston last year helped create a limited-edition boxed portfolio of artwork from “The Jungle Book” in cooperation with Disney Art Editions, the arm of the company created solely to deal with animation art. The set contained serigraphs made from colored pencil drawings by the two, plus lithographs of pre-production artwork such as storyboards, pen-and-ink drawings and sketches.
Johnston said that when original cels began pulling down tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars “we were stunned.” But did they think of their work at the studio as a form of fine art?
“We just thought of it as damn hard to do,” said Johnston, who like his friend Thomas turned 80 last year. “Now that there’s been so much attention, and so many of the pictures are available on cassette, I feel like the classic stuff that was done around the time of `Pinocchio’ and `Fantasia’ kind of established animation as the art form of this century, for entertainment and fine drawing and painting.”
Both veteran animators feel that not all animation is created equal, both in terms of technique and thematic content.
“Very few outside of Disney really attempt good drawing-they don’t need it or want it,” said Thomas. ” `The Simpsons,’ for instance, is just a type of satire and caricature style.
“There was never any real competition for what we were doing. Back when we were making drawings, Warner Brothers and MGM weren’t interested in doing characters that were believable-they wanted gags. They’d say to us, `Gee, you guys are nuts to be working so hard. What, do you think it’s going to last forever or something?’ “
In the 1930s, both Thomas and Johnston were snagged by Disney right out of art school, where they were studying the likes of Daumier, Holbein and Rembrandt as training for magazine illustration.
“Walt was expanding,” remembered Thomas. “He knew he was going to make `Snow White,’ although nobody else did, and he wanted to get people in the studio who had an art school background. Up to that time, he’d used people for the most part who came from doing comic strips, and they were good for entertainment but they couldn’t draw that well.”
The animation process reached its greatest degree of complexity at Disney. At the head of the laborious assembly line that turns out completed cels is the animator, who makes hundreds of rough pencil drawings of the key animation, sketching out extremes of a character’s movements. An assistant would then draw “breakdowns,” one or several drawings bridging the biggest gaps. Then an “inbetweener” adds the remaining, incrementally different drawings.
All of these initial drawings are redone in order to clean them up and reduce them to sets of simple, clear lines. Then, an inker would transfer each drawing-which for a feature film would number more than 150,000-onto a clear sheet of cellulose acetate. Painters then add color by hand to the back a cel with a vinyl acrylic or gum paint.
Finally, a cel (or cels, sometimes as many as seven) is photographed against a background, and cinematic effects such as zooms and dissolves can be added.
It all starts with a pencil, though, and thousands of drawings were cranked out in pre-production by many teams of animators, developing the look and personality of each character and scene.
Said Thomas, “The public for some strange reason is never as interested in those drawings as it is in the glitter of the inked and painted cels. Drawings are the heart and soul of the whole business and have the spontaneity and energy. It’s the real creative part of the animation process.”
The public may be catching up, though, in part because drawings are less expensive than original cels.
According to Deitsch, “Collectors are definitely beginning to take more interest in the drawings. I do believe that the drawing market is never going to reach the price ranges of the cels with production backgrounds, because although you see in the drawing stage the creative hand of the animator at work, the ideal that most people pursue is capturing a moment from the film, and they can’t do that from the drawings. There isn’t any color, and it may not look like the final product.”
However talented as a draftsman an animator may be, it is the cinematic experience that attracts most collectors in the first place. In the case of Disney, certainly, this makes sense from the standpoint of artistic success as well, for the purely graphic means he employed in the service of the films were not avant-garde, or even very contemporary (although Salvador Dali worked at the Disney studios for several months in 1946 on a project that was later abandoned). Depending on the film, his visual style is indebted to Art Nouveau or Art Deco or simply heavily naturalistic.
Christopher Finch, in his definitive “The Art of Walt Disney,” states the case for Disney’s genius clearly: “His greatest achievement was the creation of visual language that was totally convincing and extremely flexible . . . Disney’s obsession with naturalism seems anachronistic if one places him alongside Picasso (especially considering that the Spaniard was the senior by 20 years). At the same time, however, Picasso’s fidelity to traditional art forms-especially the limitations of the stretched canvas-might be considered anachronistic compared to Disney’s pioneering the art of animation. Disney’s great contribution was to break free of the static image.”
High art sources trickled into animation every once in a while. In Warner Brothers’ 1949 cartoon “Dough for the Dodo,” Porky Pig hunts the rare Dodo in “Wackyland,” a Daliesque landscape that makes use of animation’s fantastical kinetic possibilities, albeit still in the service of gags and broad comedy.
But apart from acquiring an animated film or cartoon on videocassette or laserdisk, the only real object that can be collected is by necessity a static image, rendering the term “animation art” virtually a contradiction in terms. This is especially so when it comes to epigones whose technical skills are seriously lacking.
When one gets right down to it, many of those interested in animation art are motivated more by sentiment than by a love of fine drawing, which is both good and bad. On the one hand, as Jim Lentz pointed out, there may be more of a personal connection to the artwork. On the other, Antiques and Collectibles magazine has flatly asserted that “buying is being driven more by nostalgia, legend and hype than historical importance and workmanship.” Meretricious “art” is easier to sell to someone who gets misty over Wile E. Coyote and doesn’t know a serigraph from a production cel.
Lentz has visited elementary schools and the like, teaching children how cartoons are made. He noted, with some irritation, that companies have even taken to telemarketing animation images in pursuit of a fast buck. “There are these million-dollar catalog houses that say, ooh, this is going to sell out! And ooh, this guy’s 92 years old! And ooh, I only have three left!”
“The fact of the matter is that the market for animation art has stayed very strong in a very tight economy,” said Lentz. “Somebody asked me why I liked it and I said, `My grandmother always wanted a Renoir, my parents always wanted a Rockwell, and I always wanted a Mickey Mouse.’ It’s right up there with jazz and Native American art-one of the purest art forms we can call our own.”
