Rough Draft Animates TV Family to Look At Home on the Big Screen in The Simpsons Movie
Once upon a time the TV set was referred to as `the idiot box.' It's taken more than a few years, but Homer Simpson, TV's number one idiot has finally broken out of the box and made his way to the movie screen. The Simpsons Movie (opening July 27, 2007) is far from the first animated TV series to travel from living room to multiplex; at the peak of their popularity Hanna-Barbera stars Fred Flintstone and Yogi Bear made the journey, and more recently SpongeBob and South Park have done so as well. Like those shows, The Simpsons is faced with the same challenge: making sure their characters look as much at home on the big screen as they do on the TV screen.
One way to make sure is to bring as much as of your creative team with you as possible, people who know the Simpsons so well they could live a few houses down Evergreen Terrace. Rich Moore is one of the movie's four main sequence directors (working under director David Silverman) and oversaw most of the movie's slam-bang climax. A regular director on the show's first five seasons, Moore jumped ship to join Gregg Vanzo's Rough Draft animation studio in Glendale, California, where he served as visual designer for The Critic and supervising director of Futurama. With Rough Draft and Film Roman (the TV series' production studio in Burbank, California) sharing animation duties, Moore has returned to Springfield.
"The TV show is pretty much limited animation, and we knew from the beginning that trying to add too much slickness would take away from what people know about the characters. We tested different levels of animation -- we tried going all the way to really fluid, all done on ones animation -- not Disney style or making them Disney-type characters, but fully done. Basically, that was going too far. It started not looking like The Simpsons and seemed foreign. "
"There's definitely animation on ones in the movie," adds Claudia Katz, Rough Draft's producer. "We're making sure to use it at the right time. The main difference is that we kept more of the animation here in the U.S. than the TV show does. It gave the directors more control and allowed for better acting. We were able to capture some subtle, observational details and get more nuanced performances."
Moore admits that thanks to Homer's usual brain-dead stare, some of those subtle details may be products of the viewers' imagination -- which is just the way the movie's creators want it. "Depending on the camera angle, we could use a Homer's blank face to say he's hungry or sad. The audience does a lot of work for us.
"We studied The Muppets a lot during the first season. Kermit is just a piece of felt with two ping-pong balls for eyes, but there's something within the situation of the moment that with the slightest change of expression on his mouth, the audience projects the right emotion on him."
The biggest difference between the TV Simpsons and the movie Simpsons is the size of the canvas their adventures are set on. "We're working in CinemaScope," Katz explains, "this ridiculously widescreen format, the widest there is. It's a very different palette from a composition viewpoint. It sets a very different tone right off the bat; on a subliminal level you sort of go `this is a movie.'"
"They wanted to make it as different as possible from the TV show," Moore adds. After doing the show for so long, you're used to over-the-shoulder angles, closeups and wide shots. Now you have to figure out how these work in CinemaScope. It took a few days, but once we got the hang of it I loved working in that aspect ratio. I thought it was terrific.
"We studied a lot of `Scope movies from the '50s and `60s," he continues. "They're just beautifully composed and we kind of just followed their lead, but if you have a really tall guy onscreen, you're out of luck." When Katz suggests, "you've got to be far away, I guess," Moore agrees: "Really far away."
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