British street artist Banksy provided the storyboard and directed the animation for the opening-credits sequence on last night’s episode of The Simpsons.

It’s pretty damned impressive — with dark undertones (the scene is set in a sweat shop, complete with fatigued unicorns, headless dolphins and furry animals being transformed into Bart dolls) and biting criticism of the show’s parent company, 20th Century Fox. The New York Times‘ Artsbeat blog interviewed Simpsons producer Al Jean about the intro, and here’s what he said to say about how they got Banksy to do it and how much was changed from his original idea:

“I saw the film Banksy directed, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” and I thought, oh, we should see if he would do a main title for the show, a couch gag. So I asked Bonnie Pietila, our casting director, if she could locate him, because she had previously located people like Thomas Pynchon. And she did it through the producers of that film. We didn’t have any agenda. We said, “We’d like to see if you would do a couch gag.” So he sent back boards for pretty much what you saw.

“…Fox has been very gracious about us biting the hand that feeds us, but I showed it to Matt Groening, and he said, no, we should go for it and try to do it pretty much as close as we can to his original intention. So we did. Like we always do, every show is submitted to broadcast standards, and they had a couple of [changes] which I agreed with, for taste. But 95 percent of it is just the way he wanted.”

The clip above is an embed from Hulu because the Youtube videos keep getting pulled.  Sitting through the commercial is well worth it – trust me.