This Season of ‘The Simpsons’ Has the Best Animation, According to Superfans

The Simpsons Golden Age is generally considered to have lasted from the show’s first episode all the way to sometime around Season 10, but the peak of Simpsons animation barely lasted longer than Homer’s studies at Springfield A&M.

The Simpsons Season Five came during a period of major change for the franchise that would survive another 30-plus years without freshening up the formula too much. David Mirkin stepped into the role of showrunner after the former Simpsons co-heads Al Jean and Mike Reiss left to produce their own series, The Critic, a show that would famously cross-over with The Simpsons a season later. In fact, following the finale of Season Four with the klassic episode “Krusty Gets Kancelled,” much of the show’s original writing staff left to work on other projects, and The Simpsons would lose yet another comedy powerhouse halfway through production on Season Five when a little-known writer named Conan O’Brien left the show to become a late-night host.

Despite the turnover in talent, The Simpsons Season Five was still a massive creative success, and over three decades after it aired, fans are still discussing the magical feeling that these precious episodes provoked — specifically when it came to the even-more-cartoonish and expressive animation style. Over on Simpsons Twitter, one such superfan recently went viral for suggesting that The Simpsons never looked better than when they were all vampires.

Complaints that the newer, sleeker art style of the current iteration of The Simpsons, which is set to start its 36th season next month, fail to capture the character and spirit of the original series are common among animation fans who disagree with the industry’s insistence that clean lines and vibrant colors are more aesthetically pleasing than the hand-drawn appearance of vintage animation. This generational divide in animation philosophies is frustratingly apparent in the changes made to the iconic Simpsons intro sequence, which the new animators have stripped-down, cleaned up and, often times, outright omitted in recent years.

However, in classic Season Five episodes such as “Cape Feare,” “Homer Goes to College” and the above-referenced “Treehouse of Horror IV,” The Simpsons shows its personality with every twitching tongue and chattering tooth mid-scream. The visual brilliance of Season Five even earned the show an Annie Award for Best Animated Television Production that year. Surprisingly, The Simpsons didn’t win the Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program that year because the show’s producers wanted it to compete in the Outstanding Comedy Series across from live-action heavy-hitters like Seinfeld and Frasier. The Simpsons, however, didn’t even receive a nomination in the category.

Simpsons producers refusing to submit the series for an animation award in its most aesthetically pleasing season just to get ignored by the awards voters feels like a microcosm for The Simpsons art style over the years — the suits have always wanted to make The Simpsons into something that it’s not.