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Claudia Katz and Peter Avanzino have been behind more of your favorite animated comedy moments than perhaps you realize. Having both started out on The Simpsons, the animation directors have long been on the team that produces Futurama and, for Netflix, Disenchantment. Indeed, their studio Rought Draft had been around for plenty of Matt Groening's best ideas, and at San Diego Comic Con 2025, both Katz and Avanzino were happy to share what it was like crafting a Matt Groening project.

Popverse got to hear this from them when they both attended the Futurama season 13 press room immediately following the Futurama panel presented by Fox's Animation Domination. Asked about her experience with both Futurama and Disenchantment., it was Katz who began explaining their creation process.

"When we started working on Futurama," she recalls, "The goal was to evolve and elevate from The Simpsons, stylistically. So those characters are a little different. When we did Disenchantment, it was sort of the same thing; they have more human proportions, they have five fingers (which was very weird at first for everybody). And the background style is very very different."

We don't doubt Katz's claims. We have to imagine that, having worked with human characters sporting only four fingers for decades, adding that fifth digit was so off-putting you might've forgotten that's actually the correct amount to have on a hand.

"We went through over a year of visual development," Avanzino jumps in, referring to Disenchantment, "Mili [Smythe] the art director, gave us a bunch of directions."

"To Matt [Groening]'s credit," Katz said. "He really wanted to see the [artist]. He wanted things to feel very hand-drawn and rendered. He was like, 'What I don't want to see is a line that looks like it came from a ruler. Or someone's literally just sort of cheating in photoshop.'"

"Yeah," said Avanzino, "On the surface, it's kind of the same process. It's kind of the same looking characters with an extra finger. But over the first four or five episodes, we kind of fell into the same filmmaking habits and Matt said, 'Hey, I don't want this to look the same as Futurama.' So we had to make quite a few shifts."

Disenchantment, with the correct amount of fingers, is on Netflix now. Futurama season 13, with less, comes to Hulu September 15.

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