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Matching Cels and Background Painting from Sleeping Beauty, 1959

Artist: Walt Disney Studio (All)

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Matching Cels and Background Painting from Sleeping Beauty, 1959 Comic Art

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Artwork Details

Title:	Matching Cels and Background Painting from Sleeping Beauty, 1959
Artist:	Walt Disney Studio (All)
Media Type:	Mixed Media
Art Type:	Animation
For Sale Status:	NFS
Views:	7,009
Likes on CAF:	2 3
Favorited on CAF:	1
Comments:	1
Added to Site:	8/15/2006
Comic Art Archive:

Description

The Story of Disney Backgound Paintings, Pt. 6, cont.

As has happened several times in my collecting history, after patiently waiting for long periods for a good representation of a type of art to turn up, once I bought my first Sleeping Beauty background, I was able to buy several more in short order.

The story of how I was able to reunite the cels of Maleficent and Prince Philip with their matching pan background is rather complicated. One evening in the early 1980s, I received a telephone call from a collector friend. He told me that he had just gotten a few full pan cels of Maleficent holding a candle from the scene where she ambushes Prince Philip in the fairies' cottage. As I should have anticipated, I received another call from my dealer friend in the San Fernando Valley a short time later. He told me that he had just gotten several cels of Maleficent with a candle. He also informed me that he had gotten a single, matching cel of Prince Philip, who was bound and gaged. I told both that I would come over the next day to see what they had. And, as soon as I finished the second call, I called my collector friend back to inform him that there were cels of Philip that matched the Maleficents. He said that he would try to get some, so we put off meeting until he could find out more. He called again, later in the week, and I went over to see what he had. Of course, he wanted me to take just a Maleficent so that he could cover part of his purchases and still keep the matching pair for himself. I told him that I would only buy the set, since he wouldn't have even known about the Prince cel if not for me. He said he would think about it and I left, knowing that he had to get some of his money back in order to cover what he had spent and that I was the only person who bought from him. The next evening I got the awaited call. Even though it was raining, a dangerous condition for the transportation of fragile cels with soluble paint, I went straight over to his house to buy the cels. I knew that he might change his mind if he dwelled on the fact that he was parting with such a great, rarely seen matching set of full, pan, cels. My dealer friend just couldn't understand why I wouldn't want one of his single Maleficents when I finally went over to see what he had. He had also chopped off the excess, unpainted celuloid on both sides of each figure, stating that the full cels would look funny when matted, with figures surrounded by all that blank space on the sides. I thought that it was just nuts to cut down full, pan cels when they almost never turned up, but, whatever. I kept my own cels untrimmed, and they sat on top of my dresser for years, a bit awkward to deal with, but ultimately worth the effort to keep them safe. It turned out that I had made the right decision, since the matching background turned up at auction about a decade later. I bought the background for a unexpectedly high price. But with the low price I had paid for the cels, before the prices of animation art had risen dramatically, the combined amount I had paid for the full, matching setup from a well-known scene in Sleeping Beauty was still sort of a bargain.

A large number of cel and background setups had been included in a travelling Disney animation exhibition organized by the studio in the early 1960s. Since Slleping Beauty was the most recently produced feature at the time, artwork from that film was most prominant in the exhibit. This American Art of Animation show was even on display at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. After the tour ended, the artwork was returned to Disney, and it was stored at the archives of Disney Imagineering, not in the studios animation archives. Most people didn't even know of that treasure trove of background paintings and cels, but I have heard stories over the years of Imagineers "liberating" pieces from the archives and taking them home. Much more recently, it was discovered that there had been a similar Japanese exhibition. Pieces of the newly re-discovered art were the subject of a book on the Japanese Art of Animation Exhibit.

But few people know that there was a third, European exhibit. In the 1990s, someone in Germany was able to obtain a hoard of artwork that Disney had simply left with the last venue of that show, a film museum in Munich. The art was sold to an American animation art dealer, who sold it off over the course of several years. I bought two of the better pieces, an oversize forest background, which included a distant view of King Stephan's castle, and a matching, full cel of Aurora walking through the forest. The other set up was a forest background with matching cels of the Mock Prince (birds), after they had been tossed aside and replaced by Prince Philip, when he first met Aurora. I later sold both to raise money for the purchase of another piece of art which was more important to me.

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	C E
Joined:	April 2006
Last Login:	August 2025
Country:	UNITED STATES
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Arts Jluc
Member Since 2006

Posted on 12/6/2006

Superb piece, great !!!

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