Isegoria

Dead Be Not Proud looks at the cultural lessons of zombie movies:

Romero’s unusual treatment of the subject matter, combining the zombie with the mummy and the ghoul, gave the zombie film what it had previously lacked: a threat to the general population. In Night of the Living Dead, it is not just a pretty young female who is threatened, but all of us — in fact, as the movie’s ending makes clear, civilization itself is at stake.

Romero’s film caught the imagination with its symbolism: the plague of zombies tearing a town to bits and eating people alive called to mind the rising disorder and social chaos of late ’60s, early ’70s America. The authorities were stupid and ineffectual, powerless to stop the horror, and people had no clue as to how to respond. Romero’s zombies evoked, on a symbolic level, ordinary people’s fears of being torn to shreds by a rising tide of crime and immorality.

As the title, Shaun of the Dead, suggests, Shaun is for all intents and purposes a zombie, as are most of his friends and associates:

Shaun is a classic underachiever, and it is clearly because there is little in the culture around him to inspire a person to work hard. With a minimum of effort, one can have a comfortable life, if a pointless and dull one, and that is exactly what Shaun has. Ed, who gets by without any job at all other than the occasional marijuana sale, serves as a caricature of Shaun’s aimlessness and a warning of what he could yet become.

But the threat wakes them up:

Shaun of the Dead brings back the stiff-upper-lip, muddling-through, stolid British attitude of years past, without any overload of irony, using humor and excitement to make it palatable and appealing to contemporary audiences.

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.