“Yeah, I used to be rich. I owned Mickey Mouse Massage Parlors, then those Disney sleazeballs shut me down. I said, ‘Look, I’ll change the logo, put Mickey’s pants back on!’ Pfft, some guys you just can’t reason with.” – Railroad Bridge Bum Walter Elias Disney is an inescapable presence in American animation. Whether or not you like him, his work, or the giant company he spawned, when it comes to animation you are living in a world he did a great deal to shape. The Simpsons always had some fun with this, enough that SNPP has an entire page dedicated to the show’s various Disney references and parodies. Zombie Simpsons occasionally attempts to do this as well and, as with so much of Zombie Simpsons, falls haplessly short. In “How Munched Is That Birdie in the Window”, Zombie Simpsons had what passed for an Itchy & Scratchy segment that was loosely based off of an old Disney cartoon called “Pluto’s Judgement Day”. I mentioned this in Crazy Noises, but the animation here is really peculiar and I wanted to highlight it with examples. Look at the startling contrast between Itchy and the background here: The two things that jump out are the coloring and the crispness. The cave walls in the background and the podium in the foreground are both colored in various hues and shades. The background especially gets darker to give the impression of a deep recess in the cave. By contrast, Itchy is flat and monochromatic. Every part of his face is the same color; his gavel, clothes and gloves also remain the exact same color and shade no matter what he does: Itchy has gone from far away from the camera to right into the lens, and yet the only thing that changes is the shape of his various parts and objects, nothing in the coloring gives any hint that he’s moved at all. The dramatic lighting of the background is similarly ignored. Itchy got bigger, but there’s nothing other than size to indicate that he’s actually gestured forward. The precision of the lines on Itchy compared with the background is even more jarring. Look at the awkward juxtaposition of his sharp hand against the fuzzy podium. Now compare that to the gavel and the background behind it. The two are identical – sharp lines vs fuzzy ones – which makes the overall image even more awkward because his hand is supposed to be physically on the podium and the gavel is supposed to be far in front of the cave walls. The entire image is muddled because all of the tricks that give depth to the podium and the walls are ignored for Itchy. Now take a look at the Disney original (please forgive the lower resolution, I had to grab this from YouTube): The backgrounds are very similar in that they’re a little fuzzy and make a lot of use of color to both make the podium look tall and the walls look…
An ongoing ramble by Charlie Sweatpants . .