Brad Bird discusses his role as executive consultant on The Simpsons:
Even though our animation was very simplified, our filmmaking was not. James Brooks and Matt Groening and Sam Simon asked me to be a part of it because they liked Family Dog — they liked the fact that it had a live-action sensibility in terms of camera angles and cutting. When I first got into it, the visual language of television animation was very, very rudimentary. There was a standard way of handling things, and that had gotten into the art form itself, to where people were doing this stuff by rote. The rule was, whenever you go to a new location, you do an establishing shot, whenever somebody’s moving, you have a medium shot, and whenever anybody’s talking, you cut to whoever’s talking. It’s all done at eye level. You never have high angles or low angles or anything like that. That’s TV animation; I’m not saying there weren’t great camera angles in Chuck Jones or anything else. But on TV, that’s the way they were doing it.When I got in there with the storyboard artists, they were approaching things that way because that’s the way they were trained. I said, “No, come on, man! We’re doing a take on The Shining here. Let’s look at how Kubrick uses his camera. His camera always has wide-angle lenses. Oftentimes, the compositions are symmetrical. Let’s do a drawing that simulates a wide-angle lens. They’re deep focus. Let’s push things off and play on that.” At first they were completely bewildered, and very soon they were into it. I said, “Look, we can’t spend a lot of money on elaborate animation, but we can have sophisticated filmmaking.” So I think the show is very visually distinctive.