Stewie Dances With Gene Kelly

Last week’s episode of FAMILY GUY included this enjoyable interlude of Stewie dancing with Gene Kelly. Wouldn’t it be something special if a modern TV series regularly afforded this much thought to its animation and choreography? The original clip of Jerry the Mouse dancing with Kelly can be seen here.

UPDATE: Steve Worth of ASIFA-Hollywood’s Animation Archive wrote in with some comments about this sequence:

How much “thought to animation and choreography” does it take to rotoscope someone else’s animation and slap your own character over the top of it? If this was a parody, it would have added some sort of comment through additional humor. If it was a tribute, they would have had the respect not to obliterate the great animation by Ken Muse and Ray Patterson by pasting their own poorly traced drawings over the top of it. To my eyes, this looks like the Family Guy crew took the hard work of these legendary artists and copped it for themselves without adding a single thing to it. They can get away with it, because the viewers probably have never heard of Gene Kelly, much less have seen the clip of him dancing with Jerry Mouse.

How eager are you to see Bugs Bunny cartoons with new videogame characters rotoscoped over the top of them? Maybe they could take Fantasia and roto a CGI Mickey Mouse over the top of Sorcerer’s Apprentice… That’s the sort of thing “great ideas” like this lead to. I’ve never understood why people feel the need to paint mustaches on the Mona Lisa and then have the gall to pat themselves on the back for their great work.

Family Guy deserves no praise for this. A ripoff is a ripoff.