Warning: this is a long ramble about animation cels that I mostly made to get it out of my brain. I hope most of the background info is correct as I’m still new to a lot of this.
For years I’ve been vaguely aware that people collect animation cels but I never gave it a second thought until a month or two ago when I discovered that cels from the production of Turn A Gundam are relatively inexpensive. I’ve spent the last month or so familiarizing myself with the animation cel market and collector community and it’s been a fun rabbit hole to dive down.
For those who aren’t familiar, traditional animation is made by painting each individual frame of an image sequence onto a clear acetate sheet (cel) that is then placed over a background and filmed to create the animated show or movie. With a typical framerate of 12 frames per second, a single 22 minute episode of an animated show can use thousands of cels. After production these acetate cels were typically discarded which has led to a thriving community of animation enthusiasts who collect and trade ones from their favorite shows.
Cels from popular shows or movies can go for huge amounts. Studio Ghibli cels in good condition consistently sell for thousands of dollars. Picking up a good Cowboy Bebop or Evangelion cel will set you back at least several hundred dollars. Popular movie and OVA cels in general are especially pricey just as the overall quantity is lower compared to a 26 or 52 episode tv series.
Luckily if you’re currently hyper fixated on a show of middling popularity there’s a good chance that you can find nice cels for much more reasonable prices. Sure a nice full frame cel of Char from Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) might be selling for $4000, but comparatively no one gives a shit about any character from After War Gundam X. Or Victory, or ZZ, or Turn A! Hell, even G Gundam’s Domon Kasshu could be yours for $50-$100 if you’re lucky. Good extra detailed shots of a mobile suit or main character might get up into the low hundreds, but there’s plenty of good looking cels in the $20-$50 range.
As I started digging through the various marketplaces and Japanese auction sites (unsurprisingly the easiest place to find cels is from Japanese sellers, which does require a bit of research and dealing with proxy services to handle international shipping) for Turn A cels I found plenty of Lorans, Diannas/Kihels, and Sochies. Even a good number of secondary characters like Fran, Joseph, Phil, and Poe. Harry Ord was more rare but one or two would show up. But one character continued to elude me, Merrybell Gadget.
Merrybell is a weird little freak. She’s a child mech pilot dressed like a harlequin doll and has little bells in her hair that jingle as she walks/floats around. She’s the most Newtype-ass character in Turn A.
She only appears in the last 10 episodes of the show so it makes some sense that cels of her would be rare. I’m not too surprised that I haven’t seen a cel of her for sale in the month or so I’ve been looking. Out of curiosity I started searching through past closed auction listings to try and find any Merrybell cels and nothing comes up. I’ve scoured collectors forums and have not found any trace. I’ve even dug through dozens of galleries on Rubberslug, a popular cel gallery hosting site with galleries going back to the early 00s, and not one has had a single Merrybell. At this point I have no idea if any cels of her actually still exist!
It’s entirely possible that no Merrybell cels still exist. The entire market is based around essentially trash thrown out after a show ends or hoarded by production staff and then sold or otherwise offloaded later. Apparently there were essentially zero Evangelion cels on the market for a long time as Gainax held onto them other than a handful that were smuggled out by staff. A few years ago they essentially dumped their vault of cels and the market was flooded with cheap Eva cels for a while until they all got bought up.
After the move to digipaint animation in the early 00s traditional cel animation essentially went extinct. The vast majority of surviving cels are at least 20 years old. And to add to the fun cels are incredibly fragile and unarchivable! The paints used for animation prioritized quick drying over longevity and don’t hold up well to UV light. The acetate sheet of the cel itself has a tendency to break down if it isn’t given proper venting and will essentially turn to acetic acid. This is known as “vinegar syndrome” and is actually contagious, the offgasing of the acetate can make other healthy cells volatile if stored close to each other.
So maybe every Merrybell has dissolved into acid or was thrown in a dumpster back in 2000. But I’m still going to keep looking. At this point I just want to see if a single cel is out there. I don’t need to buy it, just knowing that an original image of that little jester newtype freak remains intact would be enough to help me sleep at night.
If you or anyone you know have any leads that may assist in locating a surviving Merrybell cel, please contact me by fax or telex at cohost.org/facultystaff. Thanks for reading.