Which has nothing to do with joke quality. For me, I think it was season 5. They were still a little rough around the edges compared to today's toons (Did they still only have 1/2 the frames at this point?), but they had mastered most of the basics. My favorite animation example is 1F16, Burns' Heir, because of the beginning Industrial Chimney Sweep For A Day bit. I wish they animated the recent shows like that. Anyone else?
BTW, anyone who says Tracy Ulman will be shot.
TRACY ULLMAN! Go ahead, take your best shot!
Seriously, though, those shorts did have the best animation as compared to the regular run of the show. They were quirky, but amusing and interesting. Once it became a series the animation became staid, literal and dull. All this was in an effort to seem "realistic," which it doesn't.
With broad character designs like the Simpsons, they animation should also be a little broader. To try and animate characters like this with "subtlety" or "realism" (like that found in the Mowgli character in Disney's Jungle Book, say) only makes them appear odd and stiff.
I think this change had more to do with the switch from Klasky-Csupo to Film Roman. Most of the Film Roman animation I've seen is staid, literal, and dull, and this has much more to do with FR's production-line ethic than any attempts at realism. "Garfield and Friends" has the most boring animation of any cartoon I've seen.
I don't think this is exactly true. Film Roman inherited the majority of the crew that worked on the Klasky Csupo Simpsons. When the show was taken away from Klasky Csupo, the studio did not have enough work to keep all the Simpsons artists employed. (I believe they only had Rugrats at the time.)
The taming of the animation came from Matt Groening, the writers and producers. They didn't want "cartoony" animation. Groening would create new restrictive rules for the directors to follow each year. (You can hear some of Groening's pet peeves on the two DVD audio commentaries.) It just took a few seasons for it to sink in with the directors and artists.
Both K/C and FR are known for boring animation. I believe Klasky started the trend of ugly "hip" designs that one saw so much of in the nineties.
the
puh-lease.....you do know that the shorts were not supposed to look like that, and Matt had presumed the studio guys would rework his rough slapdash drawings?
the best animation period was about 5-8. not too uneven, not too sterile.
I think this Season's animation looks the cleanest ever, perhaps they went to digital?
I don't care what Matt presumed, those shorts had the best animation compared with the rest of the show's run. It is irrelevant what Matt thought they would look like.
Once Matt gained more control, the style of animation became more wooden and dull.
That peroid's animation looks rather dull to me.
Dirk Pitt wrote:
I think the best animation quality was between Seasons 5 and 8.
However, the Seasons 1 - 4 had some other qualities, for example more shading and nice fade effects and imaginative camera angles.
Especially the seasons past 10 have a rather sterile atmosphere, just lots of bright colors with almost no shading and stiff animation and very often with a way too static camera angle. It has become a little better in S13 though.
Chris
"Chris Pfeiler" wrote in message news:[email]...
shading
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with a
Yeah!
Agred with Chris %100
I'd like to add, though, that the shorts, for the most part, didn't look that bad at all. The very early ones (like the first one) looked pretty weird because of the situation Groening described, but after the first season of them they look mostly solid, more solid even then the first few episodes of season one. A friend of mine, recalling seeing the few shorts seen on the 138th episode Spectacular, actually remakred to me that he thought they took a step down in animation quality starting with the series from the later shorts. And of course, the early season one episodes and early shorts correspond in one key area: they were both largely tests for the later stuff, and much of the animation isn't quite solid on either. In both cases they simply didn't entirely know what they were doing.