Identifying Ah! My Goddess Reproduction Cels
One of the challenging aspects of collecting AMG cels is the existence of high-quality hand-painted copies of the original production cels. These reproductions are occasionally sold on Ebay and Yahoo Japan as if they were the original production cels, sometimes because the seller is not aware they have a reproduction, and sometimes with full knowledge by the seller. While the beauty of the cels may be equal, most people who collect them tend to place a higher value on the original than on a copy. Because of this, it is useful to be able to distinguish between the original and a copy when buying or selling an AMG cel. This page briefly describes what these copies are, why they exist, and ways to tell the copies from the original.
Note: Most of the discussion below relates to cels from the 5 AMG OVAs, since OVA reproduction cels are the ones that most often show up on ebay and Yahoo Japan. Near the end I will say a bit about reproductions of AMG movie and hanken mono cels.
What are these copies anyway?
These copies are hand-painted cels just like the original production cels, and made in the same way. The black lines from a drawing are copied onto cel material using an expensive machine that is something like a photocopier. Using the machine, it is easy to make multiple identical copies of the lines from the drawing. If required, some non-black lines may be drawn onto the cel by hand. Then the cel is painted by hand.
AIC, the company responsible for making cels for the AMG OVAs made multiple copies of certain OVA cels. There does not appear to be a list of cels or scenes that AIC used to make the reproductions nor a list of how many copies were made of each cel. (In other words, almost any AMG OVA cel has the potential to be a reproduction. However, the cels I’ve been able to identify as reproductions have tended to be the nicer close-up shots of the goddesses.)
Why do these reproductions exist?
The story I’ve heard from a couple of sources suggests that AIC had some of their artists make the copies for practice or as a means to test their abilities. Because of the popularity of the OVAs, AIC released some of the copies to the public to meet the demand for nice cels (the original production cels being in somewhat short supply). A bunch of the reproductions made their way to the U.S. and were sold at conventions in the mid-1990s, although other sources probably exist. They sometimes show up unannounced on Ebay and Yahoo Japan.
How can you tell the reproductions from the originals?
While it may not be possible to be 100% certain that a cel is the original production cel, it appears that the artists at AIC purposefully included "mistakes" in the copies that are easy to spot if you know what to look for. Therefore, the best way (really the only way) to determine whether a cel is a copy is to compare it to the source material. This means having access to the VHS tapes, the LDs, or the DVDs and a good quality playback system that allows you to look at the video frame by frame so that you can isolate the frame of interest. Also useful are the film manga (5 of them, one for each OVA) which contain thousands of pictures of the original cels.
It's important to locate the exact frame the cel was used for, which may be easy if adjacent frames are significantly different from one another. Sometimes, however, there are many frames in a sequence that look almost identical, so finding the one of interest may take a little work. Perhaps the face has turned just a bit or a strand of hair has moved a fraction of an inch from one frame to the next. You may also have to adjust the brightness and contrast of your TV, especially for sequences with a lot of contrast (such as backlit or special effects shots).
The two main things to look for are:
1. areas that have the incorrect color
and/or
2. hand-drawn objects that have the wrong shape or wrong relationship to
other objects.
1. Color differences. Most of the Belldandy cels I own have around 10 - 15 colors, usually found in light/dark pairs. The hair has some light brown sections and some dark brown sections. The skin and clothing have light colors paired with darker colors representing shaded areas. The incorrectly colored area is often painted the second color of the light/dark pair. In the example below, a screen capture from the DVD is on the left, and on the right is a reproduction cel sold on Ebay as an original production cel (even after I showed the seller these pictures). The areas enclosed in green on the screen cap have been painted a different color in the cel. The third picture below is from the film manga for comparison.
Sometimes the change might be to a completely different color (i.e., not just a switch between the light/dark pair). In the example below, the ebay reproduction is on the left and a cel I own (which I'm pretty sure is the production cel) is on the right. In the reproduction, part of the uniform is white instead of purple, and the shadow is missing from the necklace.
One of the first things I look at is the eyebrows. They might be a solid color, or they might have two shades representing light and shadow. Several reproductions I've seen have a single shade while the original has two, or vice versa.
Another thing to look for is differences in the shape of hand-drawn areas, such as the highlights in the hair. These are a little trickier to spot than color differences because the areas are relatively small, and the resolution of the source material (or the resolution of the picture of the cel for auction or sale) may not be high enough to be able to detect differences in shape with a high degree of confidence. However, if the difference is great enough and you can get decent quality pictures of the source and the cel, it can be useful to determine if the cel is a reproduction. In the example below, the the shape of the highlight (left arrow) is different between the VHS screen cap on the left and the reproduction on the right. In this cel I really don't see any major areas where the colors are wrong.
A couple of notes:
1. Just because a cel has a sequence number
on it doesn't mean that it's a production cel. Most reproductions I've
seen HAVE a sequence number; all it takes is a marking pen to add one.
2. To the best of my recollection, all the reproduction cels I've
seen on Ebay have been from the 4th and 5th OVAs. (However, I have seen a
couple of repros from OVA 1 on Yahoo Japan.)
Hanken mono and movie cel reproductions
A number of reproductions have been made of various AMG hanken mono cels. Officially sanctioned limited edition runs of some recent hanken cels are on sale here and some of these have shown up on Yahoo Japan. Reproductions of older hanken cels exist and have occasionally shown up on Ebay and Yahoo Japan. Some of them probably had the blessing of the studio while others were probably illegal knock-offs.
There are also officially sanctioned limited edition runs of copies of a few cels from the AMG movie. They are on sale at the same link as the hanken cels, and a few of these copies have been sold on Yahoo Japan.
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