Simpsons Go Ghibli
Studio Ghibli films—Spirited Away, Ponyo, My Neighbor Totoro—they work on you differently. There’s a patience to them, a way of sitting with moments that don’t serve the plot but somehow serve everything else. Time, detail, pacing. The opposite of how most animation operates.
The Simpsons are doing an episode where Homer wanders into a Ghibli world. Matt Groening paying tribute, which is funny because Homer and that kind of sensibility couldn’t be further apart. Homer wants to eat and sleep; Ghibli wants you to watch a character move through a space and feel something shift.
I’m curious what they actually do with it. Probably visual gags—Homer in watercolor backgrounds, that kind of thing. But there’s something appealing about the collision itself, the idea of Homer stumbling into a world he doesn’t understand and can’t eat his way through.