Cel animation, also known as traditional animation, is a technique where each frame is drawn and characters painted by hand on transparent sheets of celluloid (cels for short). The process was time-consuming and costly, requiring a large team of artists.
Cel animation starts with the lineart being done on one side of a blank cel with ink. (In later years, Xerox photocopiers replaced hand inking, except for colored lines.) The cel is then flipped over, and a painter colours it in from the other side. Backgrounds are created separately. When both are complete, the cel is stacked in front of the background. It is photographed, creating a frame. More cels are painted and photographed in sequence to create the illusion of movement.
The high cost and time consumption of cel animation often resulted in Limited Animation; for instance, reuse of the same frames for several sequences.
This technique was the main way of producing animation during the 20th century, especially in The Golden Age of Animation. It was the standard for animated films until the advent of computer animation, such as CGI or 2D programs such as the Computer Animated Production System (CAPS)—developed by Pixar and used by Disney in their animated films from The Little Mermaidnote to Home on the Range—and later, Toon Boom Harmony.
The technique started to fall out of favor among studios during The '80s because of its time-consuming, expensive nature. Most American feature film studios switched to digital ink-and-paint sometime during the mid-90s as the technology became more accessible. It held out longer for Western TV cartoons and DTV movies, but by the mid-2000s was also considered obsolete for the same reasons.note Meanwhile, anime would keep using cels for a bit longer, with major features like Princess Mononoke (1997), Millennium Actress (2001) and all Pokémon films up to the ninth one (2006) all being cel-animated. Most shows and films would transition to digital by the early 2000s, although a single show, Sazae-san, wouldn't switch to digital animation until 2013, marking the End of an Era. Despite cel animation's fall from grace, it retains a dedicated cult following for its warm, film grain-y aesthetic, and is still used in independent passion projects to this day. Many fans of cel animation believe that digital animation can't completely replicate the humane feel of cel animation.
See the Images page for examples of actual cels from various productions!
Not to be confused with Cel Shading, another type of animation that has nothing to do with cel animation.