Over the last couple of years, I've worried that AI will take over animation, and that everything will end up looking slick and perfect… but really boring. This weekend, though, has eased my fears.
On Friday, Laika’s Wildwood, the studio’s sixth feature, opened in cinemas worldwide. I've already written about how its focus on stop-motion is what we all need in the AI era. So it's fantastic news that the movie seems to be doing well at the box office so far.
Shortly after that, we got The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror XXXVII opener: a stop-motion homage to The Nightmare Before Christmas. Bart is Jack Skellington, Marge is Sally, Homer is the two-faced Mayor, Santa’s Little Helper is Zero, and Ned Flanders is a bug-stuffed Oogie Boogie. Together, they belt out a parody version of This Is Halloween, replaced by the words "Simpsons Halloween".
The Simpson's Halloween specials have impressed since 1990
Since 1990, the Halloween specials have sat deliciously outside the show’s continuity. Characters die gruesome deaths, Springfield gets destroyed, but the following week everything's back to normal. In the new opener, Lisa (dressed as a witch) even spells it out in song: "Halloween episodes are not canon". And brilliantly, that freedom extends to the animation style itself.
Thematically, this sequence and Laika's Wildwood have almost nothing in common. But what matters is that both were made the slow, handmade way: with puppets, physical sets, and people moving them frame by frame. That's truly a lovely thing to see.
Stoopid Buddy Stoodios' stop-motion animation approach
The Simpsons sequence came from Burbank’s Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, best known for Robot Chicken, which uses retro toys, action figures and dolls in stop-motion animation to deliver pop-culture parodies.
The studio could have used 3D printing. It chose not to. Co-founder John Harvatine IV told Animation World Network. “We kind of just did old school the whole way, from sculpting by hand." Similarly, sculptor Jim McKenzie told Entertainment Weekly: “I think in a time of AI, to be involved with something that’s truly handmade, it’s very special these days." Hear, hear.
It’s fitting that The Simpsons chose Nightmare as its Halloween tribute. When director Henry Selick’s chaotic classic arrived in 1993, it proved that a stop-motion feature could be a mainstream hit, and set him on the path to Coraline, the film that launched Laika.
Back then, stop-motion was seen as very old hat, a thing of the past. Three decades later, it feels like a refreshing antidote to AI and overly slick CG, and this Simpsons opener plays right into that idea.
These gruesome puppet caricatures might only be on screen for half a minute, but they’re part of a much bigger fightback for handmade animation and creativity in general. Two enthusiastic thumbs up.
