![]() ![]() It was designed to be a parody of Tron and of the state of CG at the time in general, which is one of the reasons it holds up as an episode of television 20 years later-it wasn't trying to do too much. The dimension that Homer steps into was a piece of cake, more or less. The vinyl dolls guided Johnson when he wasn't sure what to do. Luckily, The Simpsons was already enough of a phenomena that there were already plenty of action figures out of both Homer and Bart. What makes it work is the characters in the 3D animation are very true to the Simpsons characters who have remained very consistent over their life." "If you saw Homer Simpson actually walking around you'd be really freaked out. "I think what everyone nailed on that really well was making it look as much like the animation taken into the third dimension as much as throwing it in there and making it look like photorealistic reality," he said. How do you take two iconic animated characters like Homer and Bart and make them 3D without screwing it up? By not trying to make them look too human, Rosendahl said. In its 35 years, PDI didn't do too bad for itself-in January, it was shuttered as a full studio and folded into Dreamworks due to the sputtering 3D animation business.īut back to The Simpsons. PDI went on to make Antz, the second-ever fully CG film, Shrek and its sequels, and the Madagascar series. Homer3 came out in October by March, PDI was purchased by Dreamworks. They were looking for the best version of every joke." They wouldn't say no to any of our ideas, anything we came up with, they just tried to trump it with a cooler twist on it. "Working with the Simpsons taught me so much-they really took this 'yes, and' ethos of improv artists. "I had been directing TV commercials but I had written a script and was shopping it around Hollywood," Johnson said. In the long run, it worked out from a business and creative standpoint for PDI, too. "But something as iconic as The Simpsons coming out around the same time felt really good." "We were excited about Toy Story coming out, but we were also pretty jealous," Rosendahl told me. But the company really wanted to break into feature length films. Rosendahl's company had done good, high-end work before on movies like Angels in the Outfield and Terminator 2, and it had even created the digital Pillsbury Doughboy. ![]() The episode propelled PDI into the mainstream consciousness. "But only in 'Treehouse Of Horror VI' can he trip through an interdimensional rift and drool in state-of-the-art-for-1995 computer animation." "Any given episode of The Simpsons might find Homer surviving blunt trauma (and trauma and trauma and trauma, etc.)," Erik Adams wrote in a 2014 review on The Onion's TV Club. The Simpsons side was happy with the arrangement, too: In an Edmonton Journal article (accessed via LexisNexis), Simpsons writer Bill Oakley said the episode was "almost worthy of being a pay-per-view event."Įven for an animated show prone to making its characters do ridiculous things, Homer's foray into the third dimension was unprecedented at the time. "We enjoyed seeing those characters taking the first step into the 3D world, we were happy to do the nights and weekends required to keep our other jobs that paid going at the same time." "We walked into the best job doing the Simpsons, they were a dream to work with," he said. ![]() Tim Johnson, who directed the episode on PDI's end and went on to direct movies such as Antz and Home told me it was a dream for most of the team to work on the episode. That's not to say there were any hard feelings. "They said, 'this is how much we have,' and we said 'that's nowhere near enough,' but we decided to do it anyway. We got past the money part of the discussion really fast," PDI founder Carl Rosendahl, who wouldn't give me an exact figure, told me. "It was very, very little, but we were just going to figure out a way to do it. ![]()
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