The Awful Little Things in Simpsons Animation

[I'm not Mike Reiss]

awful

I also hate that piece of animation. Just one of the many things that made groan whilst watching the movie.

i love the huge pupils.

I'm also a fan of the larger pupils but sometimes they just look ridiculous and well, cartoony. I think the larger pupils are also a little more expressive and human.

[Flimpson Tide]

Yeah, the Bart cock always bothered me. I have this belief that child nudity is fucked up, so if no other movie can get away with it today, it's just weird that The Simpsons is an exception because they're animated. Why not just show the bullies having an interracial gang bang with Lisa Jr. and Janey while they're at it.

[Paul]

Why not just show the bullies having an interracial gang bang with Lisa Jr. and Janey while they're at it.

Because Nelson is racist, obviously.

[Cartoonnetwork]

I thought that gag in the movie was funny enough. I certainly don't see what's the problem with it.

I have to agree about the stiff and robotic animation today. I don't dislike the use of more colours or the backgrounds they have been used lately , although they sometimes put way too many details in the backgrounds. But the worst part is the stiff animation of the characters, I don't know whose flaw is this. I think Matt Groening himself kinda defends this.

It's also odd that they have invited John K. or Bill Plympton to do their things and gave them total freedom and still they insist on keeping the stiffness.

Ice Age 4 is already in theaters in Spain and I watched Maggie's Short, The Longest Daycare. I thought it was excellent in many ways and it even had some nice shots in the animation, but it would have been even better with the more squash and stretch touch of the old days.

[zartok-35]

One of the things I truly hate in Simpsons animation is when Nasty Matt Nastuk comes up with insipidly bland camera staging.


Clear staging only really needs to be used when you're depicting complicated acts of physical comedy, and you need to see every detail to understand the joke. But it doesn't make allot of sense to use it when NOTHING IS HAPPENING. Thats BORING!
How does keeping the character at the center or the screen create any visual interest?

Look at this unaturally perfect symmetry. It truly looks like it was mechanically produced.

[Sinister Burns]

Simple staging isn't bad on its own, but it does tend to exaggerate bad dialogue and thus make the scene look like it was from Family Guy.

[Dark Homer]

Yeah, the Bart cock always bothered me. I have this belief that child nudity is fucked up, so if no other movie can get away with it today, it's just weird that The Simpsons is an exception because they're animated. Why not just show the bullies having an interracial gang bang with Lisa Jr. and Janey while they're at it.

give me a fucking break

[Homer I Am]

LOL, why the fuck is everyone obsessed with Bart's cock?

[zartok-35]

Simple staging isn't bad on its own, but it does tend to exaggerate bad dialogue and thus make the scene look like it was from Family Guy.

Exactally! Whats the point of clearly depiticting a casual run of the mill conversation, especially if the characters aren't acting out or something? Its not showing us what it was designed to. Back in the classic era, Mark Kirkland wisely chose to use "over the shoulder" shots in sequences of dialogue, and it looks allot better. Simple staging can work sometimes, but it needs to be intermixed with other types of shots and angles to keep things interesting.

[Boris Johnson]

The horribly done lip sync of some of the scenes in the earlier seasons.
People often complain about the huge pupils of the characters from earlier seasons, such as seasons 4 and 5 especially, but I think they were quite nice.

[Handsome B. Wonderful]

Those bad lip sync things make me cringe for some reason.

[Bartesque]

In some cases, it's when they reuse animation. In Saturdays of Thunder, this scene is well-synced, but in Radio Bart, it isn't.

[Flimpson Tide]

I wonder how much work and money they saved by reusing animation. It could have been a lot since they have to draw some number of cels per second. But in some of those cases where they simply spliced in like a 3-second shot of a character watching TV or something, were the savings huge? I don't think any animation ever gets reused today, so I'm guessing there just wasn't that much money to save from recycling; perhaps computers made it easier to make quick animations (like the weekly differences in the cloud animations like crows and Lance Murdoch in the HD Simpsons intro). And in the case of music videos on Beavis and Butthead, getting animation to line up with their mouths just seems like a time-consuming, laborious pain.

[Bert Stanton]

In some cases, it's when they reuse animation. In Saturdays of Thunder, this scene is well-synced, but in Radio Bart, it isn't.

It isn't that awful, but the stock grocery store footage is the most reused surely

[cinco]

In some cases, it's when they reuse animation. In Saturdays of Thunder, this scene is well-synced, but in Radio Bart, it isn't.

So in how many episodes did that scene actually appear?

[Jimbo77]

It isn't that awful, but the stock grocery store footage is the most reused surely

I always love that gag! I always feel empty inside when the cart doesn't go backwards out of the lot.

[lolcats]

This frame has always made me cringe. There are just so many things wrong with it.

Why is Homer walking on the ceiling? This is too cartoony for even The Simpsons!

This is making me sick!
Y'know what?

I'LL FIX IT MYSELF.

Looks good.....


It would if the animators and their stupid faces wouldn't have Homer on screen at the same time as the rest of the party!

Come on! He looks so stupid! What's the matter with him?!
Why does everyone have to defy gravity?!

Do I have to fix it AGAIN?!


GOOD AS NEW.....

Unlike your idea of reality....

[Homer I Am]

Yeah, did Mike Scully come up with that idea?

[zartok-35]

[wiley207]

In the 2009-present opening, the animation of Marge nodding her head after Maggie is placed in her shopping cart and Maggie and Gerald shaking fists at each other looks like it was done in Adobe Flash. The whole show would probably look AWFUL in Flash animation, but that's just me.

OK, update time. I learned from an animator on the opening that most of it was animated in-house, and he did the Maggie-in-the-supermarket scene, and he wanted it to look fuller, but instead in the ink-and-paint process the just only used a few frames and moved them using Adobe After Effects or something. So it wasn't really Flash, but still cheap.
(I know a lot of work on the Simpsons is nowadays done on Macs, from what I heard. "The Simpsons Movie" was even edited using Final Cut Pro!)