Long before poker chips and still to this day, animation art. Specifically, the drawings and cels used during the production process.
It probably started during a family trip to San Francisco when I was still in high school. We were in Ghiradelli Square and I saw in the window of a small shop an original production piece from Pinocchio where he is being turned into a real boy. I vaguely remember there was a visible price tag from the window and the sum seemed extraordinary to me at the time (maybe $10k... I don't recall for sure). I had no idea that any of this stuff existed let alone was available for sale.
Fast forward a few years and a Warner Bros. store opened in the local mall and in the back corner they had a small gallery that exhibited and sold pieces from WB cartoons. After too long, it started:
My first piece from 1995, and the only limited edition piece I have. Everything else is production used.
A more recent purchase but from the same production era as Pinky and The Brain above.
A drawing for a new title card when Tom and Jerry started being produced in CinemaScope in 1955 or 1956. The screen shot below it is from one of the cartoons. Tom and Jerry is still one of my all-time favorites as there is little dialog and there's nothing like some good old fashioned cartoon violence to brighten the day (a frying pan to the face will
always be funny).
Gertie the Dinosaur. A long time Holy Grail I was able to add to the collection in 2013... a year before the 100th anniversary of the short. I first saw a Gertie drawing at the now closed
Museum of the Moving Image in London, England in 1998. It was the first thing you saw when entering their section on animation and I was stunned. I knew of Gertie, but didn't think
any of the drawings still existed.
This is interesting as it wasn't used as we think of a cartoon today but rather a piece used in a vaudeville act by the artist, Winsor McKay. He would have used this as the finale, stating to the audience that he had the "world's only trained dinosaurus" and would start the film while he would interact with it asking her to do tricks, scolding her when she was bad and even throwing her an apple as a treat. He would end by walking behind the screen as an animated version of himself would appear on screen, be picked up by Gertie and placed on her back, and walk off the screen. In 1914, I can imagine this just blew people's minds.
Probably 7000 drawings were made for the film (a version of the film cut and edited to be a standalone without McKay states 10,000, but more recent studies state the lower number is more likely). Most of the drawings were lost in a warehouse fire leaving around 400 still in existence.
Gertie was a landmark as many of the techniques used today were invented by McKay. Index marks so the images wouldn't drift all over the screen, loops so a repeating scene doesn't have to be re-drawn multiple times (note the "3 nod" at the bottom here... in this particular scene Gertie nods three times when McKay would have asked her if she would be good), translucent paper to make copying the backgound easier so it doesn't drift. Definitely not the first cartoon, and debatable if Gertie was the first cartoon character (probably not, but certainly the first to be billed as the "star"), but incredibly influential in the history of animation.
These are just the ones at my office. I have some others framed at home and plenty others that are desperately needing to get framed. Betty Boop, Private SNAFU, 1950s Tom and Jerry model sheet, Ren and Stimpy, Rocko's Modern Life, Pink Panther, Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist, others I'm sure I'm forgetting as I'm typing this.
They are simply a lot of fun and occasionally a good conversation starter if someone hasn't seen them before or, like I was in the past, unaware these were even things that people could own.
(Unfortunately, almost all animation being made today is done digitally. Artists and animators are still drawing, but there isn't a physical
thing that's being made. There might be special prints made of iconic scenes or drawings, but at some point they are like the Pinky and the Brain above where multiple copies can be made and sold, but the actual item that was used in that 1/24 of a second of screen time doesn't exist.)
Apologies for the reflections. I have things framed in museum glass to protect the art but also because it's much less reflective. The stuff I got already framed doesn't have that (yet!), and is a beast to try to photograph.
