Distortion at top/bottom when changing background

[Miles]

One thing I noticed in the anime series (and I'm sure it happens in some other animes of the same era), is that you can see a slight distortion at the top and bottom of the very last and very first frame whenever they change from one background/shot to another. The frame also moves slightly.

I'm guessing this has to do with 'film splicing' or similar. But I would love to know exactly what's going on rather than just speculating on my own and making half-educated guesses.

Included a couple of sample pictures.

EDIT: Uploading didn't work ("board attachment quota has been reached"), so uploaded the two sample pictures to Google Drive instead. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... EWbd6UJ0hj

[Findog]

Yeah, this is a common thing in old animes. I've also wondered what it's caused by.

[Regnant]

Some of that is actually the background paintings themselves. They typically weren't painted to the edge of the paper, so sometimes they weren't quite large enough and some shows through or also the camera could have been misaligned and angled up to high. As the backgrounds and cels are clipped together to then record the frame, there could be some damage to it like on that first one you linked.

https://www.deviantart.com/regnantscoll ... -516972125 is my set of cels, and the one on the left shows how the background isn't fully complete to the top of the cel. Though I will note that cel was made for panning, but it shows how a lot of the backgrounds aren't full and so can sometimes show through the recording process.

[James68]

I think it's mainly film splicing during editing of the episodes, as the cels and backgrounds were photographed frame by frame onto 16mm colour film(the opening and ending titles would be photographed with 35mm colour film).