Simpsonian

There's nothing like the joy of discovering other people have undertaken to help you prove a point.

Check this out.

One thing I like about art is that the artist is never in control of the image. I used to do a fair amount of drawing with India ink and nib pen because I liked the slightly uncontrollable lumpiness that resulted. Even if I wanted to draw a straight, even line, I couldn't because the ink would clump or blob or run out. But the pictures had a hewn-looking quality to them as a result that had nothing to do with me or what I had originally intended, which was great.

Lately, I've been tearing paper into strips and weaving it back together again and soaking the whole thing in water before drawing on it and the ink yawns across the page and pools in the cracks and even shitty drawings look kind of great.

But even with this non-authorial happenstance, drawing is mostly about a blank page and what you think up to put on it.

Now in film, there is no such thing as a blank page. You must take pictures of things that exist in the real world. All sorts of information is going to leak out from the screen and be picked up by the audience whether you want them to do this or not, whether it's part of the story (or overall effect) or not. Animation is a great way to think about this problem, specifically, the brown couch in the TV room on The Simpsons. What kind of couch is it? New? Worn-down? Velvet? Velour? We don't know. If we did see precisely what kind of couch it is, we could imagine other things about the Simpsons and their world. However, for the purposes of that world, it doesn't matter what kind of couch it is. Generic "couch" and no need to give it any more consideration: it's a couch, they sit on it, the end.

Perhaps this is why scripts that have good structure, yet seem empty of any actual tone or characterisation can make live-action movies of brilliant tone and characterisation. And why books can get away with providing tone and characterisation and sometimes that's it. Or not even characterisation, just tone.

In any case, the experience of watching a live-action Simpsons is oddly creepy, isn't it? Someone has made a bunch of unauthorized (by me, or you, or whoever watches it) decisions regarding the Simpsons' couch and by gum, they're WRONG.