Chomet’s Yellow

The Simpsons had been coasting for years by then, but the couch gags had become the show’s only redeeming quality. Bill Plympton, John Kricfalusi, Robot Chicken—they all got their chance to reimagine the family in those few seconds before the title card. So when Sylvain Chomet, the director of Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist, got his turn, I knew something unsettling was coming.

His version of the family was exactly that—alien and beautiful and disturbing in equal measure. Chomet rendered Bart, Lisa, Homer, Marge, and Maggie in that handmade, slightly wrong style of his, all texture and warped proportions. They looked like themselves but filtered through an artist’s peculiar eye, recognizable but fundamentally wrong. It stayed with me in a way the actual episodes never did.