A trove of anime artworks is coming to market at Heritage Auction. A three-day sale this June, titled “The Art of Anime and Everything Cool,” will feature 928 objects from the Glad Anime Museum Collection, which was founded by West Coast collector and film producer Mike Glad.
Many of the works coming to sale appeared in the traveling exhibition “Ga-Netchu! The Manga Anime Syndrome.” Set to kick off on June 25 at Heritage’s Dallas location, the sale features lots with estimates ranging from $500 to $15,000. Bidding for each work begins at $1. The auction’s total pre-sale estimate exceeds $1 million.
Glad first began collecting anime art after he helped bring the Japanese comic series Akira to the United States in the late 1980s. He went on to amass one of the largest private collections of anime art in the world.
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Works coming to sale from the Glad Anime Museum Collection include production materials, model sheets, vintage anime cels, master and key master set-ups, and toys from a variety of cult anime series such as Dragon Ball Z, Pokémon, and Sailor Moon. Carrying an estimate of $10,000–$15,000, the top lot of the sale is a production cel from Akira.
Also coming to sale are materials deriving from films directed by Hayao Miyazaki, including My Neighbor Totoro (1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989). A cel depicting an iconic scene from My Neighbor Totoro is estimated at $5,000–$7,500. Other materials headed to Heritage come from acclaimed films like Ghost in the Shell (1990), Akira (1989), and Perfect Blue (1997).
In an interview, Carl Thompson, an animation art cataloger at Heritage, said that it’s not just classic titles up for sale. “There’s a lot of popular niche titles that will excite almost any anime fan,” Thompson told ARTnews.
This past December, Heritage Auctions broke the record for animation art at auction when a Charles Schultz Peanuts character sheet sold for $240,000. Jim Lentz, vice president of animation art at Heritage Auctions, said in an interview that the category is growing increasingly popular among millennial collectors. “With baby boomers hitting retirement and millennials coming of age,” he said, “we’re starting to see modern day sports cards, Pokémon cards, and video games hit record prices.”