Moving into Spring

last modified: Thursday, March 04, 2010 (7:05:16 PM CST)

I've updated. But that's history now: I did a big roll-out on Anime-Beta, and got congratulations, interestingly, not from the usual admirers nor on the expected topics of admiration. That pleased me, for I'm hoping to raise collectors' consciousness of under-valued art, rather than just amass gloatworthy items.

With snow melting fast and bulbs starting to pop up, I've also give the gallery a spring makeover, and also renewed the "Quirky Tour" to highlight some nice art that doesn't get seen often as it's included as a thumbnail to the featured image.

But you'll notice my gallery showing up on the RS home page as "recently updated" pretty often between now and May. That's not because I'm adding items, for I won't be buying now until after Easter. But I am working on upgrading the sketch galleries by adding new genga and douga reanimations.

Vampyreshoujo has done some beautifully elegant work for my gallery, including some newly added gifs. But there are lots of simpler bits that I'd love to do, but didn't want to lay on her desk all the time.

So with some pointers from her, I'm learning to do some simple reanimations myself, which will allow me to hide some of the scans of still sketches and let people see them in their original contexts. (The still scans will stay live, though, and you can always go to "Private Area" and type in "seemorestuff," then go do just that.)

Some recent examples include a reanimation of some wonderful roughs from Inuyasha, which show just how a tricky action scene was worked out by the animation director (Ayako Kurata, later chief animation director for Black Blood Brothers):

http://sensei.rubberslug.com/gallery/inv_info.asp?ItemID=302596

It's rough, like the sketches, but you can now see how Kurata managed to get Kouga to escape a bigger enemy with three different moves. (Compare the layouts, which I also reanimated, where he uses the same move three times in a row, a good way to get yourself killed.)

Other reanimations are being embedded on pages as part of the notes. For example, a pretty image of Mayuko (of NieA_7) doing an eyeblink has been added to this page:

http://sensei.rubberslug.com/gallery/inv_info.asp?ItemID=174633

(Vampy deserves credit for the original animation, but I've cropped and tweaked it to make it fit better.)

This is an idea that I got from a fellow curator, and I'm hoping to take advantage of it to make my gallery less static and more interactive, as befits a site devoted to "images in motion." So you'll see more and more things "stirring" in my gallery over the next months.

Comments and reactions happily received!

A Plan for an Ethnography of Cel Collectors

last modified: Thursday, January 07, 2010 (9:02:31 PM CST)

A number of recent threads on Anime-Beta discussed issues that revealed some of the deeply felt but usually hidden conflicts among animation art collectors. Collecting any kind of art is, of course, competitive, as items are one-of-a-kind, and so the person who wins a given cel (sketch, background, etc.) at auction or snatches it off a dealer's site soon after it appears for sale is its absolute owner. Anthropologist Mary Douglas discussed the appeal of collecting such unique objects. To an extent, collecting animation art is like collecting fine art or original manuscripts, in that the owner of a single, unique piece of animation art possesses it and that moment in the original show completely. (The anthropological concept "fetish" is of course central here.)

This issue, it seems to me, breeds a peculiar sort of reciprocal courtesy, so as not to polarize the community of collectors by emphasizing this exclusive power principle too much. I sometimes see a collector who does not act as a community member a "hoarder" rather than a "sharer," and cels that such a person wins “go into a black hole.” So the success of Rubberslug depends on its ability to allow people who own a given cel (sketch, background, etc.) gain a share of atonement by letting others view for free whenever they wish.

Or, rather, view a shadow of it. A scan is not the same as the object itself, but a digitally created and manipulated facsimile. Most are smaller than the original and less detailed, and a recent Beta thread noted the impossibility of judging a truly fine piece of animation art through a thumbnail-sized reduction of it. I tried to leaven the drama by facetiously saying that when the next awards are given, collectors should package up the cels they want to submit and send them to a panel of judges. The other party took this as a sarcasm (gomen; it was) but it had an edge of truth. Really, there is no way to appreciate the quality of a cel except by seeing it – ideally outside of its cel bag and in good light. Paradoxically, that isn’t often possible, because of the intrinsic vice that bedevils most animation art: line fading, adhesive burns, oxidation, and so on. For their own good, most items need to be curated, not shared.

So there are multiple conflicts intrinsic to animation art collecting. It’s all about being the only person to possess a given item, but simply hoarding it isolates the owner from fellow collectors (the “Smaug Principle”). So it’s expected that one will upload a scan of it to share with others; yet the scan is only a poor copy of the original, which itself cannot be shared widely because doing so would risk its harm (the “Doppleganger Principle”). Such a situation creates multiple areas in which collectors justifiably disagree. Usually, these conflicts occur within a context of courtesy, though of course we all know of cases in which members have split off when they feel aggrieved.

I usually take my academic robes off when I come here (they itch after a day’s work), but I’ve been asked to contribute to a volume of studies of Web-mediated communities. This issue, which has been intriguing me since last winter, seems a natural; and it might even be beneficial for this community to help me describe the ways it hangs together through a self-generated canon of values. I would like to do some participant ethnography, reviewing archived threads in the MB for relevant discussions and doing some online interviews with other curators whom I know have thought about these issues. If I do this (and I want to share my intentions in a variety of ways before I start) I would fully credit the people whose posts or emails I use and post drafts of my conclusions for others to read and criticize, and in so doing help me make my description more inclusive and accurate.

What think?