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SCMP Reporter

HOLD on a minute . . . Bugs Bunny might have just escaped the grip of rabbit-stew loving Elmer Fudd, but now he needs some instant cash to fund his next exploit.

  Undeterred and quick as a flash he picks up a photocopier and knocks off a cool 500 pictures of himself, colours them in and sells them to a crowd of people jostling to hand him wads of greenbacks (or Hong Kong redbacks) for each one.

  He counts up the cash. Five hundred times HK$3,000 is $1.5 million, thank you very much, just enough to buy a whole bundle of dynamite to foil Elmer in their next adventure.

  An animator's fantasy? Perhaps it is, but it is a fantasy come true with the huge new market in what are optimistically called 'limited edition cels,' as opposed to the production cels which are actually used in animated cartoons.

  Theoretically there should be millions of original production cels around.

  After all, they have been used ever since Gertie the Dinosaur - the 1914 simple-line creation said to have been the first American cartoon star - first stomped her way through the primeval forests.

  And with approximately 24 cels a second - that's more than 7,000 cels for a five minute Tom and Jerry short, and about 150,000 for a full length feature film such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - it would be easy to imagine that the collectors' market would be flooded with original Sylvesters, Scooby Doos and Seven Dwarfs.

  But for years these little images on celluloid, and later on acetate, were not valued at all by most of the animation houses.

  Some animators, especially during World War II, when plastics were expensive and waste was unpatriotic, would rub out Popeye, Betty Boop or the numerous unflattering images of the Fuhrer, and recycle the material to entertain the ever-demanding cinema audiences.

  Hanna Barbera - the house of The Flintstones and Scooby Doo - had a huge fire several years ago, and one of the victims was its extensive library of acetates. Those were millions of characters which would never bounce back from cartoon melt-down.

  Meanwhile Warner Brothers - creators of the Loonie Tunes and Merrie Melodies characters like Bugs and Daffy Duck - are really kicking themselves . . . and each other.

  According to animation-legend, Warner Bros staff threw out dumpster-loads of old cels during an over-enthusiastic spring cleaning exercise in the 70s. The rubbish consignment would now be valued at more than a billion US dollars.

  Only the wise old souls at Walt Disney kept hold of the majority of their original cartoon images - and they, according to Kim Brazil, of Cel-Art in Hong Kong (with the franchise to sell cels from most American cartoon houses) 'are keeping a tight hold of them, and are only putting them on the market slowly.'   The cels that are mainly being sold now - and the ones that will be on show in this month's Tea and Art exhibition at the Convention Centre - never had their 1/24th of a second of glory in any animated cartoon.

  These limited edition cels have been specially created for the collectible market. According to Ms Brazil, while Walt Disney ensures that each picture is a copy of an original cel, with an original background, many of the other houses release their limited editions as a generic. So there is an archetypal Flintstones composite that has been drawn up for its 'typicalness' rather than its authenticity.

  So is it a gimmick, adding a host of non-production cels to each new animated cartoon, multiplying them by 350 or 500, hand colouring them and calling them 'limited edition'?   'Yes it's a gimmick, but it's a very successful gimmick. It's really just a matter of giving the market what it demands.'   For Walt Disney's 1994 box office hit The Lion King a 500-copy edition of one cartoon still was released in December.

  'They sold within 20 minutes of their release,' Ms Brazil said   The typical profile of a buyer used to be 20s, American and male, she said.

  But now there has been a lot of local Chinese interest, as well as older buyers who have more money to buy images like the Fantasia one-metre long strip of the Sorcerer's Apprentice which, at HK$50,500 for one of 350 copies made (plus a few artists' copies and publishers' proofs), is not an item for a dollar-counting collector.

  'Most buyers are still male though. The women that come in to the shop tend to be buying for their children or their partners, but not so often for themselves,' said Ms Brazil, who admitted that she only became interested in cels three years ago, after answering an ad for someone to market collectables.

  'I actually hoped it was for tin badges, which I'd been collecting for years,' she said.

  Why so many male buyers?   'It's because men never grow up,' she said firmly. 'They are always looking back at their childhood.'   Before anything happens in an animated feature, the artists draw up inspiration drawings ('good investments', said Ms Brazil)   The script usually comes first, then the soundtrack, and then the pictures, with mouths that move and feet that dance, come last.

  Each character in a full-length cartoon feature is 'managed' by a different animator, and put together later. So when Elmer Fudd meets Bugs Bunny the two have been drawn separately and put together later.

  In Aladdin, one animator modelled Princess Jasmin on his younger sister, and kept her graduation photograph in his wallet all the time he was working on the film. The genie was designed with Robin William's voice in mind.

   Aladdin had no production cels to speak of; the film was made using computer technology, and some characters, including the magic carpet - a rectangle with attitude - were created almost entirely with computer graphics.

  But still, there were thousands of drawings and sketches done by the animators before the computer took over, and Walt Disney issued several limited edition cels, drawn by the original animators, which have already sold out.

  'Using a computer instead of cels is still much more expensive for a production house, even though the special effects are wonderful.'   So most cartoons made today still get the 24 cels-a-second treatment.

  'But I would think that buying production cels is a better investment at the moment, just because in a few years' time, they are going to be obsolete,' Ms Brazil said.

  Meanwhile, Bugs Bunny is last seen racing towards Sotheby's auction house. 'What's Up Doc?' he chortles, as the auctioneer bangs his hammer down after the sale of another set of limited edition cels, that have, in the previous 12 months, gone up more around 10 per cent in value.

  The toons give fewer guarantees, and there is always the risk that they will in the future be seen to be worth no more than the plastic on which they are printed but they are certainly more fun to invest in than the high street banks.

    The World of American Animation Art, 6th floor Gallery Cafe, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Wan Chai, until February 3.



There's a fortune in the frame