Game of Thrones in Yellow

Tyrion Lannister in Simpsons yellow is still Tyrion. That stopped me when I first saw Adrien Noterdaem’s Game of Thrones work. I expected the specificity to disappear the moment you flatten someone into four fingers and yellow skin and those simple Simpsons eyes. But it doesn’t. Daenerys reads as herself. Jon Snow is unmistakable. The bone structure survives.

Noterdaem’s been translating TV shows into Simpsons style for a while—Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Sherlock—and they all work fine. But Game of Thrones is the interesting one because the show is built entirely on production design. Every frame costs money. The costumes, the armor, the medieval aesthetic—that’s what’s supposed to make it feel epic and weighty. But strip all of that away and you’re left with just the faces. And they’re still compelling.

It’s a useful thing to notice about character design. The production design, the costuming, the cinematography—all of that matters. But underneath it, the actual face is doing more work than you’d think. The Simpsons style is so minimal that it forces the character to survive on bone structure alone. And apparently most characters can.