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Matt Groening's Desert Island Flicks - Matt Groening presents his favourite cartoons at Animated Encounters 2002.

An Animated Encounter
  How Bristol got the scoop on the Simpsons.

It's not very often that you get to see a genius talking about what they know best. In the case of Matt Groening, creator of the Simpsons, it's even rarer. When the Bristol International Animation Festival announced a live event with the man himself, it's little wonder that the event sold out within minutes.

So, how did the festival persuade Matt to appear? Well, it turns out there were two things that tempted him - the chance to talk about his favourite pieces of animation before showing them on the big screen, and the chance to drop in on Aardman Animation. The original invite was made by Nick Park, who created Wallace and Grommit for Aardman - it turns out that Matt is a huge fan of the claymation duo, and would have shown a Wallace and Grommit film if he didn't think the audience would have seen them all anyway. It also helped that Phil Jupitus agreed to interview Matt on stage - the two are friends. In Phil's words, it was husky bearded guy night at the Watershed!

The Cult site got seats in the Bristol IMAX cinema, which took a live feed from the event. Although we didn't get to see Matt in the flesh, we got to see the animations on a really huge cinema screen! The audience was made up of everyone from kids to venerable grey-hairs, which must have encouraged Matt, as he wants the Simpsons to be enjoyed by both kids and grown ups.

We ought to make it clear at this point that the quotes from Matt in this article might not be word perfect - there's only so much of a two hour presentation you can write down verbatim in a very dark cinema! We'll do our best to give you the gist of what Matt said, remaining as faithful to his words as possible.

Bart Naked
  A selection of viciously funny clips...

Once the introductions were over, Matt explained the idea behind the talk - which pieces of animation would he want to take to a desert island, and why? He wasn't too sure that animation would be his top priority if he were shipwrecked, particularly after more than ten years working on the Simpsons. He quite fancied the idea of a giant cinema screen on a beach, though.

Nonetheless, the show kicked off with a montage of classic clips from the Simpsons. We saw Ned Flanders skiing in a very tight suit, Lisa and the crazy cat lady, Homer jumping the ravine on Bart's skateboard, and then something entirely unexpected - a French advert for 'Vizir Futur' washing powder, featuring Bart butt naked!

The strange thing about the clips was that really unpleasant, painful things happened to the characters in all of them. If the Simpsons had been real people, the audience would have been wincing with pain rather than laughing their socks off, which goes to show just how much you can get away with in a cartoon. It must be something to do with Matt's own sense of humour, because many of the films he showed were equally black, and equally funny.

The End of Futurama
  Or, why faxing Fox might not work.

Matt went on to talk about Futurama.

'You may have heard a rumour that the show has been cancelled - that rumour is true! (Laughs) The network has got another season to show, and hasn't ordered another after that.'

It turns out that Matt is a neighbour of Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Fox network. Matt bumped in to him one day, after sending him a note about the possible cancellation. All Murdoch said was that 'it doesn't look good'.

Matt was hugely appreciative of the on-line petition to save the show - which has got over 100,000 signatures already.

'Apparently, the fans are faxing it to Fox one page at a time. If that's true, they'll never pick up the show!'

Koko's Earth Control
  Why some cartoons have life, and some don't.

To introduce the first piece of animation, Phil Jupitus asked Matt Groening about what influenced him to go into animation. Matt's father was a cartoonist and film-maker. Matt once asked his dad why he hadn't made cartoons himself. His dad replied that it was just too darn hard - the trick was to create the characters and get other people to do all of the work!

One of the things Matt was taught was that 'some cartoons have life, and other's don't'. Matt was inspired by Jay Ward's 1960s Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, which he thinks are full of life.

'Although they were poorly animated, they had great writing, good voices and good music. When we started the Simpsons, I didn't think we'd get great animation. But what really works in the show is the great writing, voices and music.'

As an example of great cartoon scripting, Matt showed Koko's Earth Control - ironically, a silent animation. Made in 1928, it features a clown and his dog ending the world after finding the Earth's control room, and pulling the self destruct lever.

'I first saw it when I was about 10. I just love the dog wanting to pull the lever. Bush is the clown... it's a great comment on the current world situation.'

Matt has paid tribute to the cartoon in Futurama - it appears briefly as one of the clips on the giant billboard in the opening sequence.

King Size Canary
  How to appeal to all ages.

Matt's next choice was a famous MGM cartoon by Tex Avery, King Size Canary. 'I don't think there's anyone like Tex Avery - except for John Kricfalusi.' In this classic cartoon from the 40s, a bottle of jumbo-gro turns a cat and mouse chase in to an escalating war of size.

Groening loves the fact that Tex Avery's cartoons appeal to all ages. 'It's the secret of the Simpsons - that there are some jokes for grown ups, and some for kids. It's a great way of getting things past the censor - claim it's not for kids.'

'The music in King Size Canary is by Scott Bradley - he was one of the great orchestrators of music for cartoons. I have a CD of his stuff that I play in the car when I'm driving in LA. It makes it hard not to run in to other cars!'

It turns out that Matt's hometown of Portland, Oregon, has other famous cartoon alumni.

'The most illustrious graduate of my high school was Mel Blanc [the voice of Bugs Bunny, among others]. He came back to talk to us, and we actually stopped beating each other up for the length of the assembly.'

Find out more about Tex Avery at the Tex Avery tribute website.

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Matt found his next desert island flick on the internet.

'I never watch much animation on the internet, because I had a really slow internet connection for ages, and it all took so long to load. I've recently got a really fast connection, and I've discovered so much great animation out there. Wow!'

Matt thinks that one of the things good animation should do is disturb. He recalled a Porky pig cartoon that he saw as a child, which gave him nightmares about a demonic pie eating machine.

'Cartoons can get in to your mind and really affect you. When I saw this internet cartoon (Baby Cue by Hazel Grian) it blew me away - it was really disturbing, but really funny. I showed it to my kids - of course, if it really disturbed me, I've just got to show it to my kids! They were like 'Dad, this is sick!' so I said 'I know - but do you like it?'. They just said 'Yeah!'

You can see Baby Cue on the Animation Express website. One thing that you might get that Matt didn't is that the baby's lost father appears to be Noel Edmonds!
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Minnie The Moocher
  All about musical guest stars.

Matt's next cartoon dated from 1932 - Minnie the Moocher, which is a kind of early rock video featuring Betty Boop and Jazz musician Cab Calloway. Calloway was famous for his outrageous dancing, and appears in the cartoon as a dancing ghost bandleader in a night-club full of skeletons. Directed by the Fleischer Brothers, it's an early example of Rotoscoping - where an animator draws over a previously filmed person to make the animation more lifelike.

It was the music that attracted Matt to the cartoon.

'I used to be a rock critic before the cartoon stuff. It's been really fun to get good music on the Simpsons and Futurama. The Beastie Boys were really great, but we could never get them all in the same studio at the same time. In next season's Simpsons we've got some great guest stars.

'Homer signs up for a rock camp - which is like an Athletics camp where you get to play sports alongside your favourite sports stars, but this is for rock music. And we got the Rolling Stones - Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. There's also Tom Petty, Elvis Costello and Lenny Kravitz. We did an episode with the Ramones a while ago, and Fox didn't like it. They wanted us to get the Stones - maybe they didn't know who the Ramones were. But that's why, when they play at Mr. Burns' birthday, he says 'have the Rolling Stones killed'.'

Meeting Heroes
  Jolly Roger and Fair and Worm-er.

Matt introduced the next cartoon by explaining that he loves pirates. He's had a yearning to do a pirate cartoon for a while, but when he saw 'Jolly Roger' by Mark Baker, he realised he didn't need to - it was the definitive piratical cartoon caper.

By another UK director, it's a story about a slightly pathetic pirate crew, who run foul of some much more professional pirates, a parrot and a determined young woman bent on revenge. After the cartoon, Matt asked if Mark Baker was in the audience... he wasn't. 'Oh... OK, I thought he might be here. I didn't expect the Fleischer Brothers, though, because they're dead.'

A cartoon by the great Chuck Jones was up next - Fair and Wormer. It's a traditional style chase cartoon, with an apple, worm, bird, cat, dog, dogcatcher, his wife and a mouse all chasing each other. Matt once had the privilege of meeting Chuck.

'He was a very gracious man, and was passionate about quality animation. He once called bad animation 'illustrated radio'. Maybe he thought that was the case for the Simpsons, because it's very script heavy.'

Sadly, Chuck Jones died earlier this year. You can find out about him on his Official Website. Mark Baker works for Astley Baker productions.
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J is for Jay
  No Simpsons before breakfast!

Matt digressed for a bit before his next cartoon, as Phil Jupitus asked him if he watched his own animations.

'My kids are huge Simpsons fans. Because we have access to the show, we have lots of tapes of it at home, and they watch it constantly. It's got so bad that I recently had to ban the Simpsons before breakfast time.'

'When I was a kid I loved Rocky and Bullwinkle. Homer's name is kind of a tribute to that - Bullwinkle's full name was Bullwinkle J. Moose, which is where the J in Homer J Simpson comes from. There was a great joke when Homer becomes obsessed with finding out what the J stands for... and it turns out it stands for Jay.'

Furies
  The craft of drawing, and getting your own way.

Next up was Furies - a nearly abstract piece of animation about two cats, hand drawn in pastels by Sara Petty. Matt was really impressed with the skill and patience it must have taken to produce the three minute animation - something that would be much easier with computers, and Korean animation teams.

'I didn't study art, but I just cartooned the whole time at school. I did end up doing Life in Hell, though, which I've done every week for 22 years. Animation is very collaborative, so it's a treat to go off by myself and do my own thing, when no-one else sees it until it hits print. Also, you can't edit hand lettering, so it all goes in [the newspaper] the way I want it, or not at all.'

Phil Jupitus then showed Matt a strip from one of the Life in Hell books.

'Oh no! This is when I was still trying! If you look at the Simpsons artwork, and the originals, the style is much more crude than the TV show. If I applied to work on the Simpsons now, I wouldn't be hired - I can't draw them on model.'

Pain, Torture and Humiliation
  Pluto's Judgement Day, and scary Disney films.

'The first film I saw was Bambi. In the scene where the forest burns I thought the cinema was burning down. I was a sensitive child. Disney films are terrifying.'Matt backed up his statement by showing Pluto's Judgement Day, a 1935 cartoon in which Pluto is tried in his dreams by a hellish court of cats. It's pretty nasty, and probably would scare a small child...

'Pain, torture, humiliation, and a happy ending. That's what children's entertainment is about.'

Phil asked Matt about some of the scarier scenes in The Simpsons. It turns out that the team are aware of their audience � the Tree House of Horror episodes air with a friendly warning that younger viewers might not want to watch.

There are some near-the-knuckle episodes in the upcoming season of the Simpsons too. In one, Homer has a magic hammock that clones him, producing an army of Homers thousands strong. There's also an episode where Lisa decides to protest against handguns, and is confronted with a cemetery full of zombies with guns; and a take off of 'The Island of Doctor Moreau' starring Dr. Hibbert. We've got plenty of not-for-kids gags to look forward to, by the sound of it.

Boo Boo Runs Wild
  Hanna-Barbera re-imagined

Matt has a great way with jokey sweeping statements: 'I went into animation because I hated Hanna-Barbera'.

It turns out he can give a few good reasons why the sixties animations he watched as a kid don't stand up too well today. They would re-use the same, static backgrounds, and the violence was always off camera. The characters would rarely run off screen, and would 'zip' without their legs moving, making life easier for the animators.

Matt's final cartoon was a re-working of a Hanna-Barbera character, Yogi Bear, directed by John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy. What he came up with was so twisted, the Cartoon Network edited it, and then refused to show it before midnight. In Boo Boo Runs Wild, Yogi's little friend tires of being a cute tourist attraction, and reverts to being a real, wild bear. And drools, lots. It's five minutes of things that you never thought you'd see a cartoon bear doing... and outrageously funny.

It takes a very talented animator to do something so crazy to an established brand, and Matt obviously respects his friend's chutzpah very much. Matt spoke to a few of the animators who worked on the film who defended themselves by saying 'He was crazy! He forced us to do it!'

'I met John Kricfalusi for lunch, and his conversation is as quiet as his cartoons (laughs). The shows he was pitching... he's doomed! Then there was that updating of the Jetsons he did, where the kids skip school and end up wearing their mother's dresses...'

Watch John Kricfalusi's Showreel on the Acme Film Works website, or read an interview at The Onion.
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Any Questions?
  Loose ends tied up...

To finish, Matt took questions from his hugely appreciative audience. He talked about his inspiration for the Simpsons � the bad sit-coms about families he'd watched as a kid. Although the Simpsons could be seen as dysfunctional in a way that those perfect families never were, they still love each other.

His family have had a few things to say about the show, though. All of the characters are named after Matt's own family.

'I thought it was a conceptually funny idea , and didn't tell my family that I had named the Simpsons after them. It's not thinking very far ahead, really, because if the show is a success, they then get kind of angry'. Matt's family have got used to it now, but there were a few ruffled feathers at the start.

One audience member asked why the Simpsons are yellow.

'Yellow wasn't my choice. You initially work in black and white, and one of the animators suggested that we colour them yellow, and it looked right. Then again, she also made the trees purple, which we didn't go for. It means the Simpsons look like no other cartoon characters, though. I don't like that skin colour they use in cartoons. I loved Mickey Mouse when he had a white face, not the strange pink Caucasian colour he is now.'

Films and Profiles
  Character design, and the Simpsons movie.

Matt talked more about the design of the Simpsons.

'I think that memorable cartoon characters are always identifiable in silhouette. That applies to the Simpsons, as well as Life in Hell. The main character in Life in Hell, Binky, is a rabbit, with these two huge ears. Then I introduced his son, and wanted to make him different, so he's just got the one ear.'

'With the Simpsons' spiked heads, few people had used that before, so I got lucky really. Now I can't see a picket fence without thinking of Bart.'

Then someone asked the inevitable question about the rumoured Simpsons movie.

'Yes � I always get asked about the movie. Well, we've made progress on it, because we've had lunch, and talked about it� once! The problem is that there's enough story in every episode of the Simpsons to make a feature. It's easy to come up with a story, but to come up with the story is the trick. Besides, we're still having fun with the series...'

It looks like it could be a while, then.

A Decade of Success
  How it feels to have thirteen seasons of a great show.

Finally, Matt was asked about the success of the show, and how much involvement he has in The Simpsons after more than a decade.

'Well, I still stick my nose in where it's needed! The people who work on the show really love it, so it runs really well. The fact that the actors love their characters so much helps, too. Now I have Futurama running as well, I hang out a little bit in both offices. Sometimes, though, I'll tell the Simpsons office that I'm going to Futurama, and Futurama that I'm going to the Simpsons, and I just go to the beach instead!'

'I thought the Simpsons would be a success when it started, because I knew that kids would like it. It's been an incredible opportunity to work on a show that's lasted this long. The continuity is great � like John Schwartzwelder, who has written more 50 episodes, during more than a decade on the show.'

'It's a dream. Thank you all.'

Of course, Matt got a huge round of applause. Everyone in the audience was completely won over by his wry sense of humour, and his gentle, bearded charm. Even all of us that just got to watch him on a really big screen. Let's hope that there's another decade of his great animations to come.