The Simpsons - When Flanders Failed

[Leviathan]

This is a little mystery that I've been pondering.


The story is that this episode came back from overseas with tons of animation glitches and required extensive retakes. That much isn't in dispute, but there seem to be conflicting ideas for the reasons why. Wikipedia says the episode was used to train a new team of animators, but the actual quote from the commentary itself says the episode was done by "a company that no one had ever heard of; it was people that had just recently gotten opposable thumbs". So that means there are three possibilities.

- AKOM used the episode to train a C or D team of inexperienced new hires.
- Klasky-Cuspo sent the episode to an obscure studio they hadn't used before, but AKOM got the credit (possibly suggesting they were involved with the retakes).
- AKOM jobbed the episode out to an uncredited sub-subcontrator (which they had done before with shows like Transformers).

I know the real answer is likely lost to history, but I thought some discussion could come from it.

The commentary scared up the original cut as being a complete disaster, on par with the Encore Tiny Toons episodes, but I saw the episode recently and it didn't seem worse than any other early Klasky-Cuspo era episode. I guess the retakes did a really good job of replacing the bad footage (or the Simpsons team have much harsher standards about what constitutes an animation glitch).

 

[Classic Speedy]

Both this episode and season 2's "Old Money" had overseas animation direction by Heungsun Oh, who worked for Akom. That episode had very snappy animation timing but was a little rougher in terms of character models (they were chunkier in some scenes), so it stands out during season 2 when they were solidifying what the show would look like.

My guess is they had a newer internal team working on "Failed", though as you said it's not out of the realm of possibility that Akom might have farmed out that one to another studio.

 

[harry580]

when I said this thread, I thought its about the flanderization of Flanders but its about why the animation of Flanders looks off

 

[Peter Paltridge]

If anything the episode is useful for defining exactly WHO in Springfield is left-handed. Matt Groening is a lefty as well; he would have probably found a Leftorium useful.

 

[Leviathan]

Both this episode and season 2's "Old Money" had overseas animation direction by Heungsun Oh, who worked for Akom. That episode had very snappy animation timing but was a little rougher in terms of character models (they were chunkier in some scenes), so it stands out during season 2 when they were solidifying what the show would look like.

If the overseas animation director worked for Akom, that's probably more evidence for it being done in-house. Jim Reardon might have been misremembering on the commentary.

Reardon talks about line quality problems in the commentary, and you can see many shots where the lineart is unsually light and thin, sometimes with eyes and mouths closer to normal. Almost like the inverse of Wang giving some cartoons abnormally thick lines.

As well as some rough character models, like Skinner and Krabappel here,

It's off-kilter, but it doesn't feel like it's the work of a place that never touched the show before. Maybe it was the ink-and-paint done by a new team or farmed out.