Film Language Tag: cel animation

Traditional, hand-drawn animation where the foreground characters are drawn on transparent acetate cels and then photographed against an opaque background. This innovation is attributed to Earl Hurd who first used Celluloid sheets for motion picture animation in 1914. (Animation cels are now made of acetate.) Previously, the entire background had to be re-drawn for each new character pose. With cel animation, only the portions of an image that change from frame to frame need be re-drawn. In some cases, this is only a small portion of a character, such as the mouth. Most cel animation uses a consistent number of cel layers throughout a work, even in sequences where there are not that many independent layers to be photographed. For example, Disney animators traditionally used four cel layers on top of the background. Even though animation cels are only five one-thousandths of an inch thick, they are not perfectly clear and it would produce a visible effect if the number of layers were to vary within an animated work. Kroon, R. W. A/V a to z: An encyclopedic dictionary of media, entertainment and other Audiovisual terms. McFarland, 2014.