Ok so now that the opening has officially aired I can talk about it.  I knew about the first leaks on the net but I couldn't discuss it until it actually aired.  Contract stuff.  I watched it myself in HD and I thought it looked great, the colors and stuff were very crisp.  Here is a list of the things I worked on..

1. Crow flying across clouds-I didn't understand it's purpose either but they wanted a throw back to blinky.  The version they used was my 4th pass.  My first pass was awesome because they first told me to animate it "like a real crow but with more personality because it has 3 eyes."  So I did but Groening said it was "too cartoony," so I did another one more realistic.  He said it was "too realistic," so we settled on what's there now.  It's a little strobey because I had origianlly did it on 1's because they wanted fast wing flaps but it looks like they put it on 2's.  Once it's out of my hands I don't know what will happen to it.  I'll try and post the first one I did.  Oh, I also did the other crow landing on lard lad.

2. Bullies sawing statue head- This one I had fun with, all on 1's.  Just to repeat I didn't come up with the ideas, I just draw what they tell me.  It was one of the last things they added and I said originally, "wasn't Bart the one that sawed off the head?"  

3. Bart landing on leaves/Barney- Just added the bounce to the original animation.  Barney was fun to animate, it was done in-house meaning all the drawings are mine.  No inbetweens from Korea, Kearny/Jimbo the same thing.

4. The super market-This whole scene was mine.  I didn't like what they did where they cut pieces of body parts and moved them in the computer ie. Maggie's head etc.  It looks like it was done in flash.  About the Marge turn, I had originally done a version where she did a nice head turn but, again, they didn't want it.  "Just have a simple head turn because we want the joke to be Maggie and the unibrow baby," they told me.  I didn't know they were going to stiffen it up that much, I'm just defending myself because that seems to be the first thing people mention is Marge.  They kept my Maggie scan and popping out of the bag though and in my defense they added the fist shaking later, I didn't do those 2 drawing cycle *eck*

5. Sideshow Bob, Helen Lovejoy, Comic book guy, Disco Stu, and the rich texan on the sidewalk- Bob was fully animated on 1's as well and I did a sweet fluid version of him swinging the machete but the response I got was "it's too fancy."  I think it turned ok in the end but I still like my first pass better.  The others weren't doing much, not much to say about them.

That's basically it for the stuff I did.  The reason why the show has stiffend up is because there was an era when fox would tell directors that we had to draw every pose we drew perfectly on model.  No distorting of the forms of any kind.  It has slowly been dieing down the past couple seasons but they still insist on making the show more about the writing and less about the looks.  Every once in a while we'll get let loose and we can do some fun stuff but on the whole don't blame the artists please.  Believe me all of us working there would love to express the characters in more ways but there's just so much we can do.  I'm just happy to be working, I can't complain anyway I'm on the longest running show ever.  Hope you all liked the opening, I'd love to hear all feedback.  Please don't hold back.