Pokémon Ash Ketchum Original Production Cel with Hand-Painted Production Background (c. 2002)

Pokémon arrived on Japanese television in April 1997, and for five seasons its animation was drawn, inked, painted on celluloid, and photographed exclusively by hand, one sheet at a time. This process eventually gave way to digital production, making cels from this period increasingly scarce pieces of Pokémon history.

Marked 236 BA2, this cel is a two-layer setup. The lower cel features Ash, fist raised, in the cap and jacket of the original series. A second, smaller cel sits on top of him carrying only the mouth—a standard animation technique that allows expressions to be swapped frame by frame, without redrawing the whole figure.

Both layers survive here, along with an original production background marked 254 C-26. The background comes from a different episode, but the cels preserve the production process itself—Ash, inked and painted by hand, before the franchise went digital.