konichiwa!

well i thought that someone would find this all 
interesting, so i'm going to share with you now 
my tale of intrigue and woe. ^_^

first off, i purchased some things from yahoo! 
japan back in early november; they were some 
expensive auctions, but two of the auctions were 
must have items and the third auction, which 
coincidentally was the most expensive of the 
three, was a strange opportunity.

the first and second auctions were for cg show 
sketches, which i will be adding to my gallery 
tonight (look for an update post! ^_^).  i was 
very happy with what i ended up getting from 
these auctions, which is a good thing because i 
wasn't too thrilled with the last lot of genga / 
douga that i won from this seller.

the third auction, from the translation that i 
myself and a couple friends were able to 
decipher, was for a lot of four lodoss war cels 
and 81 settei from the OVA, which is one of my 
favorite anime.  i was suspicious of the auction 
to begin with because the price was rather low 
for what was being offered, but i bid on it 
anyway for many reasons, including the fact that 
the auction thumbnail was a picture of the 
settei, and so you wouldn't have seen the cels 
unless you clicked on the auction and went to the 
page, and also because i had to filter through 
almost a hundred pages of cels and sketches just 
to stumble upon it, so i thought that maybe not 
very many people had seen the auction.

well today i got my package from japan and low 
and behold, i came to find that i should have 
stuck with my gut instinct.  i would have asked 
for more opinions on the auction if there had 
been more time until it ended, and now i am stuck 
with a $$$ price tag and little to show for it.  
the "cels" pictured in the auction were actually 
color copies of four cels sitting on top of their 
backgrounds; i think that this was a pretty cheap 
trick to play, especially when you are a seller 
who is seeing the price of the auction skyrocket 
to a $$$ figure and you know that your goods 
aren't worth that much.  so... if anyone is 
interested in eighty-some settei of lodoss war 
characters, dragons and items, drop me a line, 
won't ya? ^_~

the fourth auction, however, is my real reason 
for posting: the unknown cel.  i posted an image 
of it here from the auction itself after it 
ended, but no one was able to positively I.D. it 
for me.  however, that doesn't so much interest 
me as getting something else I.D.'ed.

the cel in question is very old:



it's a beautiful cel, and it came stuck with 
yellowing tape to a wooden backing.  naturally, i 
wanted to get the nasty tape off of the cel and 
remove it from the wooden backing so that i could 
put it in my cel book, but after i removed the 
cel i found that there was an image on the wooden 
box:



a digital photo of the wooden image:
http://www.catsmacks.com/auroraboreali
s/unknownbg2.jpg

does anyone know the identity of this unknown 
cel?  what exactly have i stumbled upon 
underneath it, as well?  it looks to be older, as 
well, and judging by the girl's face it reminds 
me of Leiji Matsumoto's style of anime.  any help 
with identifying these items would be greatly, 
greatly appreciated, and congratulations if you 
made it to the end of this post!

haruna