"I'm Bart Simpson, who the hell is THAT?"
June 9, 2023 4:03 PM Subscribe
Kid Leaves Stoop breaks down what we know about The Simpsons style guide, a long internal document that defines the surprisingly rigid way the characters are depicted in the modern show, and have been for decades, but weren't in the Tracy Ullman shorts or first season: The Simpsons No-No Sheets. (Youtube, 23 minutes)
The video explores the style guide by looking at four characters standing at a bus stop in the show's opening, in only the first ten episodes of season one, and how they break (and sometimes follow) the many rules.
Some specific rules:
- No cross-eyed characters. Simpsons characters are allowed to be wall-eyed (as it's a characteristic of Matt Groening's art style) but not cross-eyed.
- Pupil-to-eye ratio diameter: 7:1.
- NO one-point tangents: eyes should cleanly overlap or be separate, but characters should never be posed so that their eyes touch but don't overlap!!! Unless they're wearing glasses, that is.
- Incidental characters aren't allowed to have hair looks like part of the head (like Lisa and Bart to) or Homer-style beards. "Don't out-Simpson the Simpsons."
- Teeth! Smiles should have at least three lines (four is better), don't draw the line where top and bottom teeth meet, and they should follow the contour of the smile, and don't use sharp teeth unless the script calls for it.
- No "demonic expressions." "The Simpsons are not deliberately cruel or cunning -- they often do cruel and (sometimes) cunning things, but they don't plan to... they just react. They don't think 'I'll do this and get back at them, nyah ha ha ha.' They're impulsive, reacting to the situation immediately without premeditation."
- No "cutesy curved-up happy eyeball line" unless they're laughing (sometimes). You'll know when you see it. "This ain't Don Bluth!"
- "Matt prefers as few lines as possible to define an expression." "Keep things simple. Lots of cartoonists who should know better add complicated details to their drawings that merely clutter things up. You can convey space, motion, and feeling with surprisingly few lines."
- The Face that Must Not Be Used: Twister Head. Used a lot in the show's early years (you might remember an example or two), now it's never used unless specifically called for.
- No mouths with sharp corners. No "duck-billing." Eye pupils should not be hidden by the nose.
- Lots of other things I can't be bothered to transcribe. Watch the darn video yourself.
The video explores the style guide by looking at four characters standing at a bus stop in the show's opening, in only the first ten episodes of season one, and how they break (and sometimes follow) the many rules.
Some specific rules:
- No cross-eyed characters. Simpsons characters are allowed to be wall-eyed (as it's a characteristic of Matt Groening's art style) but not cross-eyed.
- Pupil-to-eye ratio diameter: 7:1.
- NO one-point tangents: eyes should cleanly overlap or be separate, but characters should never be posed so that their eyes touch but don't overlap!!! Unless they're wearing glasses, that is.
- Incidental characters aren't allowed to have hair looks like part of the head (like Lisa and Bart to) or Homer-style beards. "Don't out-Simpson the Simpsons."
- Teeth! Smiles should have at least three lines (four is better), don't draw the line where top and bottom teeth meet, and they should follow the contour of the smile, and don't use sharp teeth unless the script calls for it.
- No "demonic expressions." "The Simpsons are not deliberately cruel or cunning -- they often do cruel and (sometimes) cunning things, but they don't plan to... they just react. They don't think 'I'll do this and get back at them, nyah ha ha ha.' They're impulsive, reacting to the situation immediately without premeditation."
- No "cutesy curved-up happy eyeball line" unless they're laughing (sometimes). You'll know when you see it. "This ain't Don Bluth!"
- "Matt prefers as few lines as possible to define an expression." "Keep things simple. Lots of cartoonists who should know better add complicated details to their drawings that merely clutter things up. You can convey space, motion, and feeling with surprisingly few lines."
- The Face that Must Not Be Used: Twister Head. Used a lot in the show's early years (you might remember an example or two), now it's never used unless specifically called for.
- No mouths with sharp corners. No "duck-billing." Eye pupils should not be hidden by the nose.
- Lots of other things I can't be bothered to transcribe. Watch the darn video yourself.
In theory, one could train a model on Simpsons dialogue and lip positions, and reverse-engineer what the background characters are saying. But not now, I'm too ... drunk.
posted by credulous at 6:12 PM on June 9, 2023
posted by credulous at 6:12 PM on June 9, 2023
In theory, one could train a model on Simpsons dialogue and lip positions
In theory, communism works!
posted by mittens at 6:51 PM on June 9, 2023 [4 favorites]
In theory, communism works!
posted by mittens at 6:51 PM on June 9, 2023 [4 favorites]
It's interesting to see the bureaucratic institutions that contribute to the cohesiveness of commercial art. In this case, you have a very small number of people who own the core aesthetics, and a large number of workers for hire who are each making their own little contributions and can't be supervised directly all the time. So you need to develop rules that allow the people at the top to control the process indirectly, to channel and supplant the judgment of the many under-workers.
posted by grobstein at 7:28 PM on June 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by grobstein at 7:28 PM on June 9, 2023 [3 favorites]
Skimming through this, it looks like these "no-no sheets" are mostly from same model pack I got a copy of when I tested on the Simpsons back around 2000. It was a *slab* of paper, like a half inch thick, all Xeroxed on one side of a bunch of legal-sized pages.
I did not get the job, if I'd persisted maybe I would have - I did some animation on a side project one of the directors had done.
My favorite bit of Simpsons advice comes from a friend of a friend who did end up on the show and struggled to get his layouts by his director. One day he finally got it. His breakthrough? Stop trying to draw and pose them like cartoon characters. Just think of them as bloated, jaundiced corpses washing up on the beach.
I dunno if that advice made it into later editions of the model pack, but I kinda hear that story in the back of my head every time I look at the Simpsons.
posted by egypturnash at 7:51 PM on June 9, 2023 [27 favorites]
I did not get the job, if I'd persisted maybe I would have - I did some animation on a side project one of the directors had done.
My favorite bit of Simpsons advice comes from a friend of a friend who did end up on the show and struggled to get his layouts by his director. One day he finally got it. His breakthrough? Stop trying to draw and pose them like cartoon characters. Just think of them as bloated, jaundiced corpses washing up on the beach.
I dunno if that advice made it into later editions of the model pack, but I kinda hear that story in the back of my head every time I look at the Simpsons.
posted by egypturnash at 7:51 PM on June 9, 2023 [27 favorites]
Truly, in order to get a consistent look out of cartoon characters, you have to pin them down so they're almost not like cartoons. Abandoning the freedom of animation. Certainly The Simpsons seems a lot less cartoony after the first season.
Animation offers a lot of storytelling freedom that doesn't exist in live action. You can put a camera anywhere, special effects don't become prohibitively costly, you want a nuclear explosion you can just draw it, animals do what you tell them, and you don't have to rent cars or hire extras. But beyond a certain part that becomes too much. Producers what a character to read as themself; too much off-model wackiness comes across as unprofessional; and if you have a strong consistent style you can then bend or break it to subtle effect, rather than it be seen as happening at the animator's whim. To communicate, I guess, you have to reduce the noise.
posted by JHarris at 8:39 PM on June 9, 2023 [7 favorites]
Animation offers a lot of storytelling freedom that doesn't exist in live action. You can put a camera anywhere, special effects don't become prohibitively costly, you want a nuclear explosion you can just draw it, animals do what you tell them, and you don't have to rent cars or hire extras. But beyond a certain part that becomes too much. Producers what a character to read as themself; too much off-model wackiness comes across as unprofessional; and if you have a strong consistent style you can then bend or break it to subtle effect, rather than it be seen as happening at the animator's whim. To communicate, I guess, you have to reduce the noise.
posted by JHarris at 8:39 PM on June 9, 2023 [7 favorites]
I found myself reading about this set of guides after finding the Duolingo illustration design guidelines - the overall manual will tell you how Duo and the other characters should be drawn, how they should move and what they should say. Like the Simpsons guide, which may have inspired it, it is written as a do’s and don’ts list. Duo must not have pupils centred in his eyes (looks creepy) or be drawn with fingers; his footprints would be perfect circles.
posted by rongorongo at 1:40 AM on June 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by rongorongo at 1:40 AM on June 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
The guest artists they some times use on the more recent couch gags are free to break all these rules though, right?
Years ago I read that the animation studio used by the show initially reproduced all the flaws of Mat Groening's first crude Simpsons drawings, because they assumed that was what the client wanted. It was only after a season or so of that style that the misunderstanding was cleared up and they understood they were free to improve on Groening's less-than-polished drawing skills. The difference is pretty striking when you compare very early episodes on either side of the divide.
posted by Paul Slade at 2:23 AM on June 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
Years ago I read that the animation studio used by the show initially reproduced all the flaws of Mat Groening's first crude Simpsons drawings, because they assumed that was what the client wanted. It was only after a season or so of that style that the misunderstanding was cleared up and they understood they were free to improve on Groening's less-than-polished drawing skills. The difference is pretty striking when you compare very early episodes on either side of the divide.
posted by Paul Slade at 2:23 AM on June 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
I started watching season 33 yesterday (season 34 not available in Europe on Disney+ it appears) thanks to this FPP, and the one thing I noticed was ... no couch gags.
posted by chavenet at 5:43 AM on June 10, 2023
posted by chavenet at 5:43 AM on June 10, 2023
Look, it takes all types, but if you've got Simpsons no-no sheets on your bed you probably should be going to their place
posted by phooky at 6:20 AM on June 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by phooky at 6:20 AM on June 10, 2023 [3 favorites]
Incidental characters aren't allowed to have hair looks like part of the head (like Lisa and Bart to)
That certainly explains why Eliza and Lester never came back.
posted by hwyengr at 7:08 AM on June 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
That certainly explains why Eliza and Lester never came back.
posted by hwyengr at 7:08 AM on June 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
I found myself reading about this set of guides after finding the Duolingo illustration design guidelines
Thanks for this, I love Duo. From the writing guidelines:
Also:
Thanks for this, I love Duo. From the writing guidelines:
Duo isI love that they don't simply say he "isn't creepy." Also I now see why certain nag messages are put in the mouths of other characters.
Helpful
Motivating
Organized
[...]
Duo isn't
Belligerent
Violent
Overly creepy
[...]
Also:
Duon'tposted by grobstein at 8:10 AM on June 10, 2023 [5 favorites]
Duo isn't nocturnal. He's a day owl.
My late dad's screen printing company did a of work for Disney, and as far as I know we were the only screen printing company that they allowed to do our own design work and layouts instead of just being handed camera ready art for whatever they wanted to have printed.
Part of the reason why is because we had a really excellent traditional graphic artist who could absolutely nail the Disney style like it was brushed or fountain pen cel animation style for the keyline work back when this just wasn't possible in vector or raster desktop publishing.
And he had to do it in a large format, high definition style for t-shirts and stuff, so it wasn't brushwork on a small animation. It was re-creating the whole keyline and brush-stroke style on like 24x48" sheets of vellum and painstakingly inking that in with rapidograph technical pens, or even cleaning that up with hand-cut Rubylith masks for super clean linework.
Anyway, during Disney's movie revival in the Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast era we would get style books and guides detailing the proportions and color callouts of all the characters that we pretty much had to keep under lock and key and were NDA embargoed until the movies came out.
These style guides and books were excruciatingly detailed and as thick as a bible or phone book. I remember the "no" sheets were kind of funny and amusing, but also relatively sparse. Like if you had access to these style books I think it was just presumed that you didn't need "no" sheets and were mostly for internal Disney use and were probably backed by all that weird Disney corporate Kool-Aid and company culture or whatever.
I clearly remember the fiasco with the phallus hidden in the castle towers of the main Little Mermaid poster design that was also used for the video tape cover art.
It was faithfully and accurately reproduced on the T-shirts we made based on the same design, except now highlighted in lurid purple iridescent foil over puffed/raised ink and looking even more vein-y than the originals.
We must have printed hundreds of thousands of those shirts and I stared at them nearly every day for, oh, over a year or so and didn't even notice the very obvious phallus in the design until it hit the news and people started talking about it. Which is weird because that's totally the kind of thing I would notice and mock.
And then once you saw it you couldn't unsee it. I don't think Disney ordered any more of thos shirts after that or asked for a re-design, but we were already moving on to newer movies like Beauty and the Beast and character designs from older classic films and stuff.
posted by loquacious at 4:26 PM on June 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
Part of the reason why is because we had a really excellent traditional graphic artist who could absolutely nail the Disney style like it was brushed or fountain pen cel animation style for the keyline work back when this just wasn't possible in vector or raster desktop publishing.
And he had to do it in a large format, high definition style for t-shirts and stuff, so it wasn't brushwork on a small animation. It was re-creating the whole keyline and brush-stroke style on like 24x48" sheets of vellum and painstakingly inking that in with rapidograph technical pens, or even cleaning that up with hand-cut Rubylith masks for super clean linework.
Anyway, during Disney's movie revival in the Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast era we would get style books and guides detailing the proportions and color callouts of all the characters that we pretty much had to keep under lock and key and were NDA embargoed until the movies came out.
These style guides and books were excruciatingly detailed and as thick as a bible or phone book. I remember the "no" sheets were kind of funny and amusing, but also relatively sparse. Like if you had access to these style books I think it was just presumed that you didn't need "no" sheets and were mostly for internal Disney use and were probably backed by all that weird Disney corporate Kool-Aid and company culture or whatever.
I clearly remember the fiasco with the phallus hidden in the castle towers of the main Little Mermaid poster design that was also used for the video tape cover art.
It was faithfully and accurately reproduced on the T-shirts we made based on the same design, except now highlighted in lurid purple iridescent foil over puffed/raised ink and looking even more vein-y than the originals.
We must have printed hundreds of thousands of those shirts and I stared at them nearly every day for, oh, over a year or so and didn't even notice the very obvious phallus in the design until it hit the news and people started talking about it. Which is weird because that's totally the kind of thing I would notice and mock.
And then once you saw it you couldn't unsee it. I don't think Disney ordered any more of thos shirts after that or asked for a re-design, but we were already moving on to newer movies like Beauty and the Beast and character designs from older classic films and stuff.
posted by loquacious at 4:26 PM on June 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
An acquaintance used to work for Fox in its licensing department, making sure that action figures or lunchboxes or whatever conformed to guidelines. Getting the right shade of yellow for skin was essential.
posted by neuron at 9:49 PM on June 10, 2023
posted by neuron at 9:49 PM on June 10, 2023
If you watch the DVD commentaries, the first two seasons are basically the show runners complaining about the size of the characters eyeballs!
posted by TwoWordReview at 10:28 PM on June 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by TwoWordReview at 10:28 PM on June 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
And I guess praising John Swartzwelder too…
posted by TwoWordReview at 10:30 PM on June 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by TwoWordReview at 10:30 PM on June 10, 2023 [2 favorites]
In 1977, Disney threatened to sue Marvel because it thought Howard the Duck (then just a comics and newspaper strip character) looked too much like Donald. Marvel was so scared of the big bad mouse that they meekly let Disney's people draw up Howard's new style sheet for them and accepted it wholesale. As The Comics Journal put it at the time: "Don't bother with lube, we'll just hold his cheeks apart for you".
posted by Paul Slade at 1:26 AM on June 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by Paul Slade at 1:26 AM on June 11, 2023 [5 favorites]
That Duolingo style guide explains a lot about how it got blander. I mean, it was never gritty, and I didn't ask it to be, but there were a lot of stories with names like "The Hernandez Family Curse" that I was interested in reading. Before I got that far, they wiped those, leaving only the cutesy little tales about the characters, and not even as many of those as they'd deleted. Seems like a new brand manager "taking ownership" in the tackiest way.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:32 AM on June 11, 2023
posted by Countess Elena at 7:32 AM on June 11, 2023
Marvel was so scared of the big bad mouse that they meekly let Disney's people draw up Howard's new style sheet for them and accepted it wholesale.
And apparently they made him wear pants. (As one of the few people who actually saw the movie, I seem to remember this. Except, I assume, during the sex scenes.)
posted by TedW at 4:17 PM on June 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
And apparently they made him wear pants. (As one of the few people who actually saw the movie, I seem to remember this. Except, I assume, during the sex scenes.)
posted by TedW at 4:17 PM on June 11, 2023 [1 favorite]
I was a layout artist on the show from seasons 5-8 and these model sheets were already being circulated when I signed on. The ways that characters needed to be constructed almost as 3D objects was already in place in the early seasons, but there were always little cheats to make things work. The straight-on views are weird so there was a kind of crew consensus to give the characters forward facing eyes withe 3/4 view mouth placements when facing the camera, which sounds odd but looked less janky than the season one models. It's funny, the simpler a character design is, the worse it looks when you get it wrong . There was a lot of hammering out to do stylewise in a short period to get the look right and I feel like the art directors nailed it pretty early on. (Brad Bird had a lot to do with it, but he predated my time there- I was told he worked on a bunch of those 'No' sheets)
posted by biddeford at 11:05 PM on June 12, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by biddeford at 11:05 PM on June 12, 2023 [6 favorites]
the simpler a character design is, the worse it looks when you get it wrong
Charles Schulz's Peanuts characters are the classic example here. It's easy to screw up drawing Charlie Brown because you have so few lines to work with.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:43 PM on June 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
Charles Schulz's Peanuts characters are the classic example here. It's easy to screw up drawing Charlie Brown because you have so few lines to work with.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:43 PM on June 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
biddeford, there's a couple of documents circulating called Brad Bird's Pearl of Wisdom. This one's from King of the Hill; This one appears to be from The Simpsons. Do either look familiar?
posted by JHarris at 3:33 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by JHarris at 3:33 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
Ah, that second is from a blog post here. I figure it'd a good idea to link to the parent post rather than just hotlinking the PDF.
posted by JHarris at 3:35 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by JHarris at 3:35 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
Thanx JHarris! I never saw those- they would've come in handy, believe me...
Now that I think of it, those were probably part of the pack specifically for storyboarders. Great advice btw
posted by biddeford at 9:21 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
Now that I think of it, those were probably part of the pack specifically for storyboarders. Great advice btw
posted by biddeford at 9:21 AM on June 13, 2023 [1 favorite]
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