Okay buying experience, but the company willfully damaged the cels before sending.
This is a late review, I purchased from Animation Legends back in 2021 when I saw that they had a deal on Sonic animation cels. I often wondered whether I should leave one. But after a year of owning these cels and remembering this whole thing, I decided to share my thoughts
At first I was sceptical, we have all seen the simpsons episode where bart buys an itchy and scratchy animation cel, only to receive a floating arm in the mail as opposed to a full itchy or scratchy cartoon.
With this, I emailed the company beforehand asking whether this would be a possibility. To my surprise, they came back quickly, showed me a sample of the cels I could receive and even said I could have the ones in the image, if I placed an order. The cels were great, full characters with a good mixture of the big and small ones for good measure, not stellar stuff that anyone would remember, but decent enough to frame and call your own. So with this I accepted.
When receiving the cels there was a big flaw. I received the ones I saw in the email and some other decent ones, so was happy with those. However, the white paper that was under the ones in the image I saw with production sketches of key frames were missing. These pieces of paper contained sketches which showed either the same animation frame or the next frame in sequence, so these had unique artwork relevant to the art that was on the cel. They had clearly been removed, in some cases with little care, leaving bits of paper and damage to the fragile paint of the cel.
When I messaged back to ask why, I was told that people were complaining that they came stuck to paper and were being removed to combat these complaints.
The problem is this. The company claims to care about animation history yet has willfully destroyed a good part of it. The cels are the main feature, however these production sketches are also one of a kind and a big part of the appeal of buying these products.
Now these cels feel incomplete. I was never given the choice as to whether I wanted to keep the paper with sketches or not and what is worse is that I have since seen similar sketches being sold separately on their website, leading me to believe that they are profiting twice of artwork which I really should have in my possession right now. Art of my buying decision was based on some youtube reviews which had these intact. But, it seems that this is only the case for youtubers.
Either they were sold for extra profit or they have been thrown in the rubbish. Whichever way you look at it, it's a waste and not a business practise I can get behind.
