A single image in an animation sequence www.jegsworks.com/Lessons/reference/glossary-noframes.htm

A clear plastic sheet on which an image has been inked or copied and then painted. Finished cels are placed over a background and photographed in sequence to create the illusion of motion. www.srlabs.com/llgls.html

A transparent sheet of cellulose acetate or similar plastic serving as a support or overlay for drawings, lettering,etc., in animation & title work
aniland.cyper.co.kr/Terminology.htm

edit: I guess saying thanks for the info would be nice

You're absolutely right about cels - it is a transparent acetate sheet, and has been in use since the very early days of animation. Of course, not since the very earliest days of animation (Gertie the Dinosaur et al), as that was done on paper, but it sucked having to draw out the same background 24 frames a second, or shining a light through your animation to see some faint crap background behind it.

So, eventually, cels were introduced as a means of having a moving character but not having to redo the same background for each frame and retaining a wonderful clarity of image. However, acetate was and still isn't particularly cheap. And of course, it took valuble time to produce the animation, then trace, ink and paint the cels. Hence why most cartoons pre-1950 were shorts. I remember a wonderful tale of Warner Brothers early animations being done on the same eight cels, because they couldn't afford any more. They'd literally produce the cel, snap it and then wash it and reuse it. Quality stuff!

Then came Xeroxing straight to acetate. Instead of having to ink each cel by hand, you could photocopy your pencil image straight onto acetate! Hurrah. Hannah-Barbera used the time-effective Xeroxing method to the death with their huge slew of cheap, easy to make, clone series of the 60's. Unfortunately, the line you get from Xeroxing is grainy and pale at best; inking while more time-consuming yielded much better results.

Cut to the early 90's. Disney decide to ditch cels in favour of totally computer inked and coloured animation. The marked clarity, creative control, time and money saving results from using CAPS, Disney's proprietary animation software, were phenomenal. The Little Mermaid was the last totally cel animated feature Disney produce, The Rescuers Down Under was the first to exclusively use CAPS. And they've used it ever since.

Eventually, the time and money saved by using computers in hand drawn animation made it pretty standard across the board. In fact, I can't think of any animation created recently that hasn't been created using systems like CAPS, ANIMO, et al, over here, in the States or even in Japan who were very quick to adopt it after Disney went CAPS only.

Another interesting note about the paints they used on the cels is that they were very heat sensitive. If the weather was too warm, animators would sometimes arrive at the studio to find the sheets stuck together with melted paint, and if it was too cold, the paint would crack and they'd have to do the whole dang thing over again, hahhaha... also, although the paint looked pretty clean on the front side of the cel, the back looked like a bloody smear, just the way it was with the paints, hahaha. I think they also had a problem with the ants eating the paint back them because of the sugar content in them or something between the lines... yup, those were the days when everything could go wrong

--------------------
www.xynthica.com

hehe

quote:

---

Originally posted by Tri_kento:
the only real history of cels i got is from the one episode of the simpsons were bart buys a cel frame from the itchy and scratchy show and he gets a arm of scratchy.(a funny episode to say the least) and that's about all i know about cels and junk.

---

As I eventually found out, animation is about cutting as many corners as possible. In other words, being as lazy as possible to achieve an effect that looks seamless and required more work than it actually did!

The arm cel from the Simpsons is a classic example of a technique exploited to death, especially in anime. Instead of drawing the whole figure moving in a sequence where not much else moves, the animators would just animate the stuff that did move, and have another cel for the stuff that didn't behind it. Anime characters are notorious for having a static head and flapping mouths; the flapping mouths themselves are only usually two or three cels worth of mouth shapes! That way, your workload was again reduced signifcantly, but no-one hardly noticed

Of course, some bright spark also spotted that 24 frames a second wasn't necessary to achieve the illusion of movement. The human brain could perceive movement at a mere 12 frames a second. So that was the workload halved again!