It’s very easy to look back on the last 25 years of The Simpsons and write it off as being rubbish because, well, for the most part it has been exactly that. But sometimes, like the sun shining through for an hour between passing storms, it can still get its shit together, and the upcoming tribute to Death Note looks like one of those rare occasions.
It’s part of the show’s next Treehouse of Horror Halloween compilation, and will give The Simpsons a full anime makeover for one of the episode’s instalments. You can see it in action in this short video below, which introduces Lisa as the recipient of the Death Note (or, as it’s called here, the Death Tome):
— Out of Context Simpsons Treehouse of Horror 🎃 (@OOCCouchGags) October 25, 2022
Some screenshots have also been released, giving us a good look at anime Homer and Marge as well:
If your first thought was, “Wow, that looks a lot better than I was expecting,” you are not alone! But there’s a very good reason this looks so authentic to the source material: this segment has been animated by Korean studio DR Movie, who have a long history of helping out behind the scenes on various American and Japanese properties. These have ranged from The Animatrix to Justice League to, most importantly in this case, the Death Note anime series itself.
The episode will air on October 30, and will be the second of three segments. The other two will be a Babadook homage starring Marge, and a Westworld parody. Which is weird, given The Simpsons has already done a Westworld thing, one that lasted an entire episode, and is one of the series’ all-time greats. But I guess 1994 was long enough ago (and the modern HBO series so different) that they feel like they can do it all over again and newer viewers won’t even notice.
UPDATE: Turns out there’s a VERY long and cool history to this, with its origins dating back to fanart drawn in 2008, as pointed out by Turbotastic in the US article’s comments! Here’s what Turbotastic’s comment says:
This story is missing the really cool context: this episode all began with one Deviantart image by a Simpsons fan.
In 2008, DA user Nina “SpaceCoyote” Matsumoto posted this:
And some time later, she switched it up:
Good on her for nailing both styles! Both pics (along with several other manga-style Simpsons drawings she’s done) were so popular that a few years later, Simpsons Comic publisher Bongo Comics (RIP) invited her to contribute a full-length Death Note parody to one of their annual Treehouse of Horror issues:
So, much like the Death Note anime itself, this episode is being adapted from a comic (though obviously with some major differences, like giving Lisa the notebook instead of Bart. In the original comic, Lisa was “L,” (clearly the joke was too good to resist) but putting her in the Light role probably makes more sense.
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