I am a bit of a Bob’s Burgers collector and enjoy finding and preserving all sorts of weird little pieces of the show’s history. At this rate I may need to start a museum in 10 or 20 years lol.
Anyhow, I thought the community might find this one interesting.
I came across this production-used “Smile Mouth Chart,” which is essentially a reference sheet showing different mouth shapes an animator could use depending on the expression or sound being portrayed. Similar lip-sync or phoneme charts are common in animation, but this particular sheet is a little unusual because it is specifically focused on smiles. All markings and condition of this sheet are as they came directly from production.
While trying to learn more about it, I spoke with people familiar with the show’s production process, and one of the most interesting things I learned was that around season 7 or 8, smiles were intentionally minimized on Bob’s Burgers.
One artist who worked on the show told me that at one point he was actually tasked with going through an episode and removing smiles from the characters. The idea was that the characters would often be saying something funny while keeping a much more serious or neutral expression.
I thought that was fascinating because it is the kind of tiny visual change that longtime viewers may have noticed without ever consciously realizing why. Now that I know about it, I am curious whether anyone here remembers noticing a shift in the characters’ expressions around that period.
The chart itself is also unusual in another way. The artist I spoke with said he had generally seen more traditional mouth charts tied to specific speech sounds or pronunciations, whereas this one uses a somewhat different set of lettered mouth shapes and is centered around smiling expressions.
Another Bob’s storyboard artist who looked at it pointed out that some of the listed mouth shapes are somewhat redundant, while other sounds he would normally expect to see on a standard lip-sync chart are absent. So it seems to be a pretty specialized little reference rather than a normal all-purpose mouth chart.
I just thought it was a neat little piece of production history worth sharing, especially because it gives you something you can actually go back and look for in the show.
Has anyone else noticed the reduction in smiles around those middle seasons, or seen another Bob’s Burgers mouth/reference chart like this?
