Springfield Seen from a Different Continent

The Simpsons couch gag stopped being a throwaway joke and became its own art form somewhere around the time the show itself became a legacy act. The episodes can be mediocre now, often are, but what happens in those first thirty seconds has gotten stranger and more interesting with every passing season. Bill Plympton brought his grotesque, scratchy bodies to Springfield. John Kricfalusi did something deeply unsettling with the family’s anatomy. The Robot Chicken crew turned it into a stop-motion nightmare. Each one says something about the animator doing it—the Simpsons as raw material, the couch as a blank canvas.

Sylvain Chomet’s version is the one that has stayed with me. Chomet directed The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist, both hand-drawn, both suffused with a melancholy most animation refuses to go near—a European specificity that insists on being uncomfortable. His Homer is doughy in a different way. Something in the line weights makes the family look like they’ve been living in a slightly sadder world than usual, where the colors are a little muted and the proportions are off in a way that reads as haunting rather than funny. Springfield rendered in Chomet’s hand looks like a memory of Springfield, not Springfield itself.

It’s a strange thing to watch something you’ve known for thirty years and feel disturbed by it. That’s exactly what Chomet managed. The source material barely changed—it’s still Homer, still Marge, still the couch—but through his eye the whole thing becomes a ghost of itself. Which might, in the end, say more about what The Simpsons has become than any episode could.