When did The Simpsons get bad?

[Leo656]

The art and animation is terrible now. It LOOKS like it was done on a computer, far too "clean" and completely sterile. Everyone stands perfectly still like one of their action figures, until it's time to talk. It looks terrible compared to the earlier hand-drawn episodes which, while admittedly "rougher", had tons more personality.

You used to get things like small facial tics and subtle movements in between speaking spots. All of that is gone now. "Soulless" would be an apt description. It's been a problem in cartoon shows ever since computer animation became the standard. Everything obviously looks more "clean" with smoother lines but it also looks like no human hands ever touched it and it was all done by robots. It's awful.

In the "real" Simpsons episodes, nothing was ever static, there was near-constant motion and movement and it was very dynamic. In a simple shot of Bart walking through a room, for example, he might be whistling, moving his head side to side, taking his hands in and out of his pockets, all at once... now, it's a lot more likely that a shot of Bart walking through a room would be JUST that, without any of those little quirks... just a plain, boring shot of a computer-animated Bart walking stiffly through a room, until he reaches the point where he would be programmed to stop and talk to someone. Boring. Flat. Sterile. No life or personality to it. The characters are all robots.

The earliest episodes might have looked like someone drew them in a moving car, but at least they had personality and style. Ironically enough, while the modern episodes are "drawn better" they look like garbage comparatively. This is true of every long-running cartoon that underwent the switch to computer animation. Computers simply cannot capture the spark of life that's inherent in hand-drawn animation. Even shows that are "drawn bad on purpose" to try and simulate the effect of "real" cartoons, such as Bob's Burgers, fail to capture this. It's part of the whole "uncanny valley" thing.
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I can't even fathom how anyone would think the newer stuff was "cute". If anything the show has become a LOT more mean-spirited ever since Family Guy got more popular and thus The Simpsons was forced to copy it.

They seemingly constantly have Homer and Marge's marriage barely hanging on by a thread, always teasing that they're going to cheat on each other, or should, implying or flat-out saying that they'd be better off with other people, the "future" episodes show them divorced and estranged, Bart's gone from just being a scamp who still has a good heart to a flat-out Bad Person and the show's "future" timeline makes no illusions about him being a complete failure, Lisa's become more and more a parody of herself (like everyone) and her future shows her to be a bitter failure who had to settle for Milhouse... it's just a non-stop reminder of "These are terrible people with terrible lives and they're all going to grow old and unhappy because frankly they're all too stupid to ever change course."

That's not "cute", it's f*cking depressing. The show used to be a LOT more hopeful and optimistic, once upon a time. And sure, the way they're depicted and the way its portrayed that in the future they'll all be dismal failures might be "realistic", but nobody watches The Simpsons to see that crap. It's escapist entertainment. Nobody wants to be beaten over the head with "Yeah, Homer and Marge's marriage is destined to fail" or "Bart's either going to be in and out of jail or otherwise die young", or any of that.

It's all gotten way too cynical and that's not at all what the show was ever intended to be.