Dragon Ball Z Piccolo Oversized Original Pan Production Cel with Hand-Painted Production Background (c. 1989-1996)

In March 1991, Dragon Ball Z aired episode 82, "Launch, Goku!! The Enraged Frieza's Second Transformation." Revived and newly fused with Nail, Piccolo is fighting Frieza on even terms, and doing it while still wearing his weighted training clothes. Partway through the episode he throws them off.

Television cels were normally painted to fit a fixed camera field. When a shot needed to move across a figure or landscape, artists worked larger, giving the camera room to travel across the image. The result was Pan cels, and they survive in far smaller numbers than their standard-format counterparts.

This one measures roughly 20 by 14 inches, giving Piccolo room to fill the frame in his purple gi, white turban, and weighted cape. Rather than a close-up or partial figure, like most standard cels, here the Namekian fills the frame with cinematic scale.

Toriyama created Piccolo with the intention of introducing a "proper" villain after finding that his earlier antagonists had a tendency to become too likeable. The character would ultimately become one of his favorites in the series. The anime made one visible change to the design: where Toriyama drew Namekians with four fingers, Toei gave them five.

Accompanied by an original hand-painted watercolor production background, with registration marks and annotations still visible—an evocative record of the traditional animation process behind the finished scene.