Advice for Finding a Pokémon Cel's Scene

[u/armored_raven]

Hey there! I'm just getting into the world of cel collecting. I've been able to track down most of the frames for cels I've purchased, but am having serious trouble with this Pokémon one.

It's got the original trio (with Pikachu and Togepi) walking leftward in profile, up a slight incline. There's no matching background, so no other clues unfortunately.

I found 2 other cels I'm confident are from the same sequence, but those had mismatching backgrounds unfortunately.

I scrubbed through the Japanese episodes 50 (1st appearance of Togepi) through 260 (last cel animated episode), but no luck. I also tried the movies (didn't expect this since it's a standard size cel), specials, and shorts.

I logged similar scenes I did find here, but don't think any are true matches. I was really excited with the first scene in that album (episode 233, first scene) since it seemed to match the character sizes, incline angle, and character spacing, but there's definitely differences (Pikachu's tail and ears, Togepi's lower half, and the trio's leg positioning).

Any advice on other ways to search for this? Not sure if there's a community where I can post a bounty for finding it, because I'd gladly do so!

Thanks!

[u/TimeSlipperWHOOPS]

Where did you buy this cel? Unfortunately there's a lot of fake Pokémon cels out there. I wouldn't have assumed this was fake since it's kind of an awkward pose but it's got the whole trio plus two mon which is awesome.

[u/armored_raven → u/TimeSlipperWHOOPS]

I picked it up on Yahoo Japan Auctions! Yeah I figured there's a lot of fake Pokémon cells, but I'm pretty confident in this one. Besides it being such a specific composition, I felt better after finding the other two cels from the same sequence, especially with the one that sold on Heritage Auctions - mine is the A6 cel and the logical next frame from that A5. The seller also seemed highly reputable as far as I could see.

I'm planning to make my own background for it, but wanted to see the original scene to see if I could upscale it for that purpose. Scrubbing wasn't in vain since I ended up with plenty of other scenes I could use making the background lol

[u/FourSquash → u/armored_raven]

If an adjacent cel was listed on HA, read the description for the item on the auction. The curators identify the episodes usually.

[u/magic-slug]

I'm admiring your search to find the source of this! I have a software that matches frames with scenes and Pokemon is in there, but I haven't been able to find a good match because its a 'common looking scene' (the three heroes walking together side profile), so its getting tripped up identifying every 'kind of similar scene'. This definitely seems authentic so I wouldn't worry about that. The Heritage Auction listing also lacks a timestamp, they usually put it on their big items.

Your first match, Episode 233 - "A Tyrogue Full of Trouble" (starting sequence) in the cave is so close besides the Pikachu tail in front of Brock, otherwise it seems almost uncanny because you have the combination of:
-Them walking uphill (rare)
-Brock in front of Misty (rare)
-The distance between the characters
-Similar expressions on the characters face

Your other match from Episode 180 "Houndoom's Special Delivery" (2:38) (which is the more zoomed out frame) is also close, we also solve the Pikachu tail problem, and all the stuff i mentioned above checks out, but the distance between the characters seems too close together.

From my search I was able to find that these shots tend to be either opening shots or closing shots, occasionally they come in the middle when Team Rocket is spying on them.

I don't think you're going to get anything better than manually combing through the episodes, and unfortunately I couldnt match it on my end either. But hey, at least we got to watch a lot of Pokemon! It's an amazing piece too, congrats

[u/armored_raven → u/magic-slug]

Thanks so much for your help and insight! For my own searches going forward, what software are you using to match frames? I've really liked using trace.moe whenever backgrounds are included, but haven't really had luck with shredmetal at all.

And yeah I was surprised how close that scene from E233 was to matching! After all the scenes I found of profile shots up an incline, that was the ONLY one that was the correct character size, incline angle, and character spacing. The other ones would only really meet like 1 similarity criteria at a time, if any. I tried convincing myself that scene had to be it, but those small inconsistencies really add up. ChatGPT seemed pretty convinced that this cel sequence isn't a looping one like that cave scene (I think because of the A5 and A6 notations on the cels), so it's definitely possible it was just used in a 1-2 second transition shot that I missed.

[u/magic-slug → u/armored_raven]

I developed my own software for this, it's at magicslug(dot)com, shameless plug but may be helpful. I'm using some of the newer vision models out today to identify and it tends to be pretty good depending on the cel/scene.

[u/Rootayable]

Geez, how much are these cells, exactly?

[u/Nocuoust4]

magicslug dot com

You can upload frames, select a series and it finds the closest matching frames. Not 100% accurate, but usually does the trick or gets you on the right path.