Why was the animation so weird in old Simpsons?

Why was the animation so weird in old Simpsons?

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>1st seasons look weird compared to later seasons
the sky is blue, also because the Rugrats guys animated it

There's looking weird and then there's having this really weird and questionable animation style that I don't understand having in any show. Which maybe can indeed be attributed to the Rugrats guys.

Cheap Korean slave-labor animation.

for the record, not even the main simpsons crew liked it. at all. they had to re-animate one of the episodes out of disgust of Klasky-Csupo's rubbery style, and that's why Simpsons is what it would become

youtube.com/watch?v=Njf85iYRrOc

>why are the silly designs animated in a silly way?

are they literally autistic?
what cartoon do they think they're watching?

On one hand, this work print does look pretty bad even compared to the style of the earlier episodes. On the other hand, it's better than flash tweening by far.

Anyways, to answer OP's question, they seem to have had a lot less direction in terms of how to draw the characters and how not to. I'll post in a second one of the modern model sheets, which is basically geometric breakdowns, in comparison to stuff like this one. There wasn't a mechanically set way to draw the characters yet so the art was wildly inconsistent.

One of the modern model sheets.

It's easy to shit on this, and there's a lot of issues especially with the layout, but it's honestly a closer adaptation of matt groening's cartooning style (at least at the time) than the Extremely Regular Drawings they evolved into. Like all they really had to go on was grungy life in hell comics and the tracy ullman shorts. youtube.com/watch?v=RtruzpZm8FU how much better does this (clearly unifinished) test look thank most of these?

Better than the boring animation they currently have.

Honestly Gabor Csupo and Matt Groening seemed like such lazy hacks in the beginning of their careers it's amazing they lucked out and landed The Tracy Ullman Show and The Simpsons in the first place. If the next Klasky Csupo animated project and Groening's Netflix series looks like shit color me unsurprised.

A lot of long-running series have a different feeling at the beginning of their run than later on. It takes a while before they figure out what things work and what don't. Art, characterizations and/or tone can change as a result.

Simpsons were using the Klasky-Csupo studio at the beginning. Those guys are known for their unusual art style.

The first seasons had some animation hiccups. This user mentioned the most infamous case: Still, some mistakes stayed. Video in OP has wrong hair color on Moe and Barney, and there was the black Smithers too.

Google for words like 'bart simpson twister mouth'. They were doing this odd animation quirk in the earlier seasons. It wasn't an animation mistake like people sometimes think, it was just something they deliberately wanted to do. It got phased out because it looked strange.

There's also the story about how Groening drew the initial sketches of the Simpsons characters in a hurry. He assumed that the animation artists would clean up his crude sketches. But the artists took them as model sheets and traced them exactly the way they were. (This was for the Tracy Ullman show though, and the models were changed a bit when the cartoon got its own series.)

These guys look a bit more Groening-inspired than the characters they draw today. I think that could be a factor too. Character designs had a lot of variation and few rules, much like how Groening draws people. Later seasons go less wild with character designs or animation, and their OCs don't even tend to have series quirks such as blue hair.

They didn't want the Simpsons to be Tex Avery or Daffy duck
Despite the fact its a cartoon, they wanted it to be more grounded.
No hammerspace for example.

Then why not make it look fucking grounded? This isn't King of the Hill.
What about yellow skin and huge overbites says grounded exactly?

klasky csupo

This is dope. I don't remember Rugrats being this fun to look at. I get that this probably wouldn't have taken off like the actual Simpsons did but I'm loving this now.

The animation started to get really stiff in Season 6 when they switched to digital layout tools.

I'm glad the style got changed to how it looked in the golden era, when things were more grounded but still just off model enough to compliment jokes; like Homer's weird buginess when he sings Sugar, Honey Honey.

Their complaints are awful, though. The animation is definitely too zany for the dialogue drive humor, but mocking that nobody obeys the laws of physics is ridiculous. Especially since they were following the laws of cartoon physics, which is different from, say, John K. characters that just sort of float and hover freely without any ties to reality.

Because it used to be animated by cartoonists.

What's with the million doorways in the background? That's more effort than just having a plain wall.

>Do not move upper teeth up and down

It's sad that someone actually had to be told this.

They knew what they were doing.

What is their thought process behind drawing this? Do multiple people really agree that it's necessary? They could have easily had her dress cover completely.

i remember when the simpsons writers could write kids

>Gee Wizzzz.

How many shows actually have kids written as kids?

early simpsons
beavis & buthead
bobs burgers
ummhh...
king of the hill
well, most animators and cartoon writers never have kids so they write them as they remember their own childhoods through rose tinted glasses and other cartoons with the same problem

Butts are funny and people weren't that hung up on the whole child molestation moral panic.

I'm guessing they were trying to give the house a bit more depth by showing some other rooms, but they didn't have a concrete layout and got carried away trying to make it "work"

south park was ok

Bloomers are designed to be seen, It's part of the style. There's no way girls would be allowed to wear short dresses otherwise

>laughter stops
That dance scene did something to them. They were looking forward to having something to laugh at, but it's actually really good, maybe too good because they wanted to display a stiff and borin old couple that doesn't go out to dance much. Matt left shortly after for some reason.

man fuck them, this animation looks great

Klasky Csupo

it's fun to look at but it's not great. There are some real bad parts but it has a charm to it

gross

Post more BORT

Visible bloomers on little girls was extremely common in illustration until the late 90.
There was sometimes a coy sexuality to it (animators have always been perverts) but it’s mostly just meant to be cute and feminine, a majority of people never thought anything dirty about it. Then people became hyper-aware and sensitive about pedophelia

the 100% on model shit we get today isn't great either

i agree but you can't let your characters go this much off model. And at least apply some rules of perspective

>those 2 bart-haired guys interconnected

First seasons were produced by Dr. Nick himself and even Comic Book Guy would hate them along with the Ullman shorts. They were horrid. Like the Little Mermaid was out around early Simpsons for comparison.

"Its a cartoon, so it must be all stretchy and wacky, right?"

-Klasky Csupo's mindset

>there's people here that unironically like this shitty animation
fucking contrarian hipsters

Gabor Csupo wasn’t at all lazy, he was just weird and foreign and didn’t understand how the American industry worked. He was an animator classically trained in Europe who lucked into getting The Simpsons job based on a showreel of student films made by him and his staff (as at that point Klasky-Csupo hadn’t made actual cartoon animation, just making spinning logos and things of that nature) which were unique and impressive, but also done with a wealth of time. Once they had a real job with a deadline they had to figure out on their own how to produce animation on time with a small budget, and obviously there was going to be fumbling along the way.
Once The Simpsons became popular they started talking to Nickelodeon about producing a series, and once talks got underway he took it upon himself to “develop” some shows, a concept which he fundamentally misunderstood; generally in the industry development entails finding talent and having them pitch their ideas to you, while he thought it just meant “coming up with shows”. So he and his wife and Paul Germain (who he hired to be story editor despite the fact he had literally never written a script) shat out Rugrats and a bunch of other ideas in an afternoon.
Then after that show also was a hit he continued to create all their other series.
And to get some idea of his taste, he’s a big fan of artists like Frank Zappa and The Residents (which probably also endeared him to Groening) and he was more personally involved with the production of Duckman and Ahhh! Real Monsters than any of their other shows.
The weird gross aesthetic is intentional, basically.

Also fun fact, they wanted the designs for As Told By Ginger to be even uglier than the ones that made it to air and fought Nick on it, eventually they compromised

...

Yeah what the fuck

Are there any concept pieces?

The aesthetic is largely the fault of Igor Kovalyov, the guy who made the 1990 short "Hen, His Wife." Csupo personally loved it so much that he reached out to him about work, and the rest is history.
youtube.com/watch?v=fYdaHaNRMKg

>klasky-csupo

You say "the fault" Like Kovalyov ain't a genius

I’m not sure if any are public, I learned that tidbit from an audio Arlene Klasky interview

It's interesting on its own, but I'm not sure it needed to have the effect on the Klasky-Csupo house style that it did.

I think it's also worth recognizing that Klasky-Csupo really came into their own over the next few years and the animation and design took a gradual nosedive once they left. You don't get colors like this on the simps after the third season, and i think we can all speak to how rigid the characters become

>left
“Fired” is more accurate
But yeah, after their first two shows were both successful they gained the money and staff to do some competent, interesting, unique stuff. Not conventionally attractive, by any means, but lots of character

The Simpsons house has a million rooms so..

Thanks for this. Definitely an interesting style; definitely reminiscent of the KC style, for good and bad.

have you never watched Ren and Stimpy or OKKO?

no one in this thread has taste and I can't believe you people call yourselves animation fans, fucking pathetic

Neither of them seem to be lazy at all, just eccentric.

...

It's more of a legal thing, you can't reject paying them if you told them they couldn't draw something a certain way wrong unless you explicitly tell them not to.

What is the model sheet for KO? Steven Universe goes off-model and that is part of a sheet, only expression-wise.

I also hate when animation is actually animated