[IMG:L]Matt Groening represents vindication for every kid who got in trouble for doodling during class. Groening‘s little doodles of the Simpson family have become the most lucrative franchise on television. With 18 years of episodes in syndication, books and memorabilia, and The Simpsons Movie hitting theaters, Groening has created an empire.
Hollywood.com: Why has it taken 18 years to get this movie made?
Matt Groening: It’s taken 18 years because we’re lazy. We’ve been asked that question quite a bit and we don’t have a good answer.
HW: How have you and The Simpsons evolved in that 18 years?
MG: Well, you know what’s great about this movie is, on the TV show we were working very quickly, on a tight schedule, a tight budget. On the movie we were able to work on the script until we got it right, and we took a long time writing the script. Then we went into production and we tried animation that is far more ambitious than anything we’ve ever done in the past. I think it’s inspiring to the entire Simpsons enterprise.
HW: How surprised are you it’s lasted this long?
MG: Well, this is beyond most cartoonists’ dreams. People go into cartooning because they’re shy and they’re angry. That’s when you’re sitting in the back of a classroom drawing the teacher. I was just talking the other day with these guys. I went through a phase where people would introduce me at parties as a cartoonist and everybody felt sorry for me. “Oh, Matt’s a cartoonist.” Then people further feeling sorry for me would ask me to draw Garfield. Because I’m a cartoonist, draw Snoopy or Garfield or something. And now, the feeling of success, being asked to draw Bart and Homer is unbelievable after all these years. Look at the design of Homer. Very few lines in that face. There’s no human iris. It’s just a dot and a circle. All you have to do is change the shape of the circle slightly and he’s the greatest actor of the 21st century.
HW: The voice is pretty brilliant too.
MG: Dan Castellaneta, yeah, let’s talk about the voices. The voices of our cast are absolutely perfect. Dan Castellaneta as Homer and Krusty the Clown and Grandpa and all the rest is actually unbelievable. In fact, I think one of our favorite scenes in the movie is Homer trudging through the snow talking to himself, cajoling himself to keep going and as he often does, disagreeing with himself. It was an improvisation by Dan.
[IMG:R]HW: How long did you expect the show to run when you were starting out?
MG: I always thought that the series would be successful. I thought if we could get it on the air, I thought kids would tune in for sure. I didn’t know if adults would give an animated prime time TV series a chance, but I thought kids would. And the fact is adults did too. I would say that one of the interesting things about this whole process has been as famous and big the Simpsons have been around the world for the last 18 years, we were basically working in the dark. We worked very hard on the show and then we’d go home and watch it with our families. And with the making of the movie and the attention that it’s got and the promotions around the movie, specifically Kwik-e-Mart, to see the lines outside of Kwik-e-Mart and the enthusiasm of people were staggering. And yesterday we were in Springfield, Vermont for the Springfield premiere of The Simpsons Movie and it was an amazing experience. We were given the keys to the city and it opens up every door.
HW: There are so many writers and producers on The Simpsons, who has the final say on whether a joke gets in?
MG: The fact is this has been a collaborative effort from the very beginning of the series. It’s an amazing thing. That’s the nature of animation. That’s how animation works. It is great writers, great actors and great musicians working together to create something even better. It’s very, very hard to describe the process of working with other people, writing jokes, in the same room for hours a day, late into the night for months and in this case years, on end. I think it’s sort of like trying to be amorous with a three headed dog. You’re going to get licked a lot, but someone’s going to get bitten by the end of it.
HW: Are there people holding you back from getting too political?
MG: On The Simpsons, I will say that we definitely like to comment on what’s going on in the world and we try to be funny. If we can figure out a way of being funny about it then we’ve gone part of the way of accomplishing our task.
HW: What sort of nods to the hardcore fans did you put in the film?
MG: Definitely Homer going over the Springfield gorge back in one of the very, very early episodes, that was one of my favorite scenes and we pay tribute to that in the movie.
[IMG:L]HW: As an animation fan, do you think The Simpsons Movie will reenergize the traditional 2-D form?
MG: I don’t know. That’s so great. There is something about the hand drawn gesture. I think it’s why comic books are successful. Comic books are not drawn with computers. They’re people. Fans have their favorite artists. In The Simpsons I can see specific personalities of animators and directors. I can see David Silverman in basically everything that the Simpsons are today because of the rules that David and his cohorts established back in 1989. Back in the very early days we were basically making it up from scene to scene and realized that the characters had to look the same if it was going to be professional. These days we still try to obey the rule of no unnecessary motion and no unnecessary lines. In a regular animated character, in a conventional non-Simpson cartoon, if you’re going to indicate some kind of emotion of anger, it would probably be the lines [on the forehead] would frown and there’d be lines up here and there’d be all sorts of extraneous lines. In The Simpsons, we try to do every single emotion without adding extra lines, maybe a line here. Even in the poster where Homer has his mouth full of donut, we debated this line [near Homer’s mouth]. What if he didn’t have that? What if it’s just like that? So I love that deer in the headlights look that we have from this poster. It is something that you don’t see in other movies.
