Tied to its inaugural Animation Power List, The Hollywood Reporter hosted its first Most Powerful People in Animation breakfast on Friday, in a toast to both the legends and the newcomers.
The event — held at Spago Beverly Hills and sponsored by Paramount Animation, Warner Bros. Animation, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation and ASIFA — began with some mingling and early morning cocktails, followed by a keynote conversation with The Simpsons creator Matt Groening and showrunner Matt Selman, moderated by THR‘s Scott Roxborough.
The iconic series surpassed 800 episodes earlier this year as Selman said that looking back over the run, “I’m grateful that I got to spend 30 years, even in the most stressful days, having fun and being silly with fun, silly people, and that’s the big deal.” He jokingly added, “Everyone who leaves regrets it, except for maybe David X. Cohen, Greg Daniels and Conan O’Brien. Everyone else wishes they stayed, and they wake up every morning going, ‘Fuck!'”
Groening and Selman also touched on the show’s uncanny ability for predictions — Groening darkly teased, “We predict that live executions will be live streamed in the future … but to take the edge off, we’re going to ask animators to add wacky sound effects: gong and zap and maybe sad trombones” — and the upcoming Simpsons Movie 2, arriving 20 years after the first film.
“We still haven’t recovered from the first movie, basically,” Groening explained of the long gap between films. “The first time we did the first movie, it was the same people, the same number of animators and the same writers, and so it was exhausting. It was too hard. But finally, we have recovered enough that we no longer remember how hard it was.”
The pair also weighed in on the future of The Simpsons, with Selman noting, “I would love to not cling to the show forever and let fresh people keep it amazing forever. I hope the show goes on forever, but I don’t need to be the guy forever, and I had a good run.”
Groening added that when he’s asked about ending the show, “I always say, ‘No end in sight.’ And that’s how we all want to die, right? By surprise,” to laughs from the room. Selman agreed, “Just yank it. Just shoot it in the back of the head. … Other than that, it’s never going to end.”
The second portion of the event highlighted Tangles, an animated film that debuted at Cannes this year and follows a young woman’s return to her conservative small town when her mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Voice cast stars Abbi Jacobson and Samira Wiley joined Roxborough to talk about the movie, which in a rare move allowed the actors to record their lines in the same booth.
“I do think that the performances in the film would not be what they are without having that chemistry in the room,” Wiley noted, as Jacobson emphasized, “I got to be in the booth with [co-stars] Julia [Louis-Dreyfus] and Bryan [Cranston], together and individually. It was, some would say, a career high. I don’t really know what I’m doing after this.”
Jacobson, who recalled that she was “soaking wet with my own tears” when watching Tangles for the first time, also spoke about how the project deals with Alzheimer’s, saying, “If anyone has experienced that, that is one of the hardest things that we can go through. I loved that this version of the telling is filled with so much humor because going through it is so sad but there are really funny moments, and so I just thought that it really did this incredible balancing act.”
Also in attendance at the event: DreamWorks Animation’s Margie Cohn and Kristin Lowe, Skydance Animation’s Carolyn Roach, Warner Bros. Animation’s Peter Girardi and Matt Matzkin, Forgotten Island directors Januel Mercado and Joel Crawford, former Disney animator Mark Henn, actress Tara Strong, Cartoon Saloon CEO Anthony Leo, Acme Filmworks founder Ron Diamond, Verve co-founder Bryan Besser, Point Grey president James Weaver and Sony Animation’s Kristine Belson and Damien de Froberville.
