I wonder if the regular animators from the show did it, if so, it would have been a good opportunity for them to experiment with more fluid animation.
I've noticed with a lot of cartoons nowadays that when they decide to do a musical episode, they usually reference or parody Disney films in some way. Though the creators of family guy took it that much further, and it's hilarious.
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After what we've been learning about construct and representation in animation, I'm gonna give this one a bash:
Stewie:
Stewie looks like the typical child in a Disney movie; short body, big round head and big blue eyes. Seeing as Stewie is a child character anyway, a lot of what make him look like a child was already there.
Brian:
The design of Brian makes me think of the tramp from 'Lady and the Tramp', though it's only 3 small things that do. Firstly, there's the shape of the nose, it's a wide triangle with a bit of shine on top.
The other thing is the scruffy bits on his chest and chin.
Lois
Straight away, made to mirror the typical woman in Disney movies, although Snow White seems to look the most similar, mostly due to the short hair and poofy sleeves and dress. She's also the first person we see when the music starts, perhaps again referencing to common singing female characters in the movies, although she doesn't sing much. To be fair, her voice is REALLY annoying.
Peter
Peter is the typical bumbling, clumsy but jolly fat man. A big pink nose and large mouth look like the fat lazy drunkards often seen.
Quagmire
Quagmire as a bird...not too sure how deep his conversion might be. Perhaps it's just because his long nose looks like a beak. Also, perhaps Quagmire tends to just appear and disappear in the usual series, how birds just tend to land somewhere, peck about and then zip off again.
Meg
Giving Meg Ursula's tentacles is a great way to reference the show's recurring joke with her ugliness.
Joe
Making Joe a teapot could possibly be because it's the same shape of his head. This is usually reversed when designing characters, often making them morphologically similar to the object, stereotype or job that they are associated with. The first example that comes to mind is the teapot in 'Beauty and the Beast'; it resembles a kind, podgy old lady. The round shape is 'friendly'.
Less subtle examples are often used for humorous purposes, like some of the background characters in 'Corpse Bride':
The clock-maker sweeping at the start of the film resembles the grandfather clocks in his shop; he is tall and thin and his broom swings in time with the pendulum, the grocer has an onion-shaped head and the town crier is in the shape of a bell.
...I'm going on a bit...
Also, Joe in Family Guy is in a wheelchair normally, so making him a limbless, yet a mobile (anything can happen) teapot might also be a reference to that.
Cleveland
A skunk. Flower from bambi? or maybe it's just because Cleveland is black and skunks are black. Perhaps his choice of character is just to fit to the song. I think most of the background characters have been chosen like this.
the end bit
Old herbert is portrayed as the evil lady from snow white, and the characters comically knock him away with pies. Then Mort enters and is brutally beaten to death, followed by Stewie's "Oh yeah, I forgot, this is a DISNEY universe". This is probably to do with talk of Walt Disney being anti-semitic.
I'll talk about that issue a bit more once I've found out a bit more about him.
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After all that talk of pie...Pie man is hungry
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