Sometimes looking closely at the animation cels can provide clues of production, hiding magic touches that went totally unnoticed at the time…

Whenever I go to buy a cel, I always go through the original special video to make sure the scene they’re selling is actually in the special! Seems silly, but it can point out some interesting things.

Original drawing used to make animation cel.

In this case, I was purchasing the cel based on the artwork above (I actually bought the drawing separately, but from the same seller, so it was a nice companion piece to have).

Animation cel, but was it in A Cosmic Christmas?

Looking for the particular frame, I noticed the drawing is in there, but the colouring is all wrong. In the scene, Marvin’s henchman does his best impression of a Martian, moving under the streetlight, giving himself a green glow…

An animated gif of the scene from A Cosmic Christmas where everything turns green…
Turning green under the streetlight.

I had a think of this for a while, and it certainly seems like this was because it would have been done by special effect. The idea of turning something in a smooth blend from “lifelike” colours to green would have been really difficult in animation. Each frame would have to be just a hint greener, and in a uniform way that made all of the colours go green, but different greens. No, obviously, the green was achieve through camera effects. The animation would have been rendered normally, then the colour altered smoothly and consistently with the film. We take all this for granted now that almost everything is computerized, but this would have been a really cool (but entirely unnoticed) effect in the original animation. The day-to-day creativity that went into setting up scenes deserve an awful-lot more appreciation than they get. Things we don’t even notice are little touches of animation magic.

For framing purposes, I made up a background approximation of what was in the original scene. Foreground it entirely the wrong colour, but that’s okay…
A composite of the cel and the approximated background.

Perhaps I should have framed it with a green acetate over top of it to approximate the real scene, but I think it’s pretty cool as it is. And very cool getting to explain why it’s a real cel from A Cosmic Christmas, but that it doesn’t appear like that in the final product.