THE SIMPSONS MOVIE

Reviewed by Sam Hatch

It's hard to believe Matt Groening's dysfunctional family of jaundiced cartoon characters has been on TV for as long as it has. I remember catching the original Simpsons shorts on The Tracy Ullman Show twenty years ago in the early days of the Fox Network (and occasionally their theatrical reruns in select theaters), and thinking it was the edgiest stuff I had ever seen. Of course nowadays The Simpsons is about as edgy as a plastic frosting scraper, and I admit that even as a longtime fan I tuned out years ago. Though I still remember the last time the television show made me laugh – it was the December 17th, 2000 episode “Skinner's Sense of Snow”, wherein the students and select faculty of Springfield Elementary found themselves snowed in. Student Ralph was forced to use a steel scouring pad as a pillow and proclaimed that it was “cold and hurty.” It was pretty funny.

If only the rest of the show hadn't devolved into a weird miasma of non-sequiturs that were also astonishingly non-comedic. So when I saw the first trailer for The Simpsons Movie earlier this year, it didn't induce any of the fanboy excitement that the teaser for South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut elicited back in ‘99. (It's funny how South Park's creators still revere and give homage to The Simpsons even while their own show is ten times better now). However, the second trailer arrived and for the first time in eons, The Simpsons made me (and countless others) laugh.

Technically, it wasn't any member of the Simpsons clan, but rather a porcine adoptee whom patriarch Homer (voiced by Dan Castellaneta) dubs 'Spider-Pig'. I wonder if the film's impressive opening numbers would have been nearly as high without the public's infatuation with that porky real star of the film. I kid not. Spider-Pig, (aka Plopper aka Harry Plopper) even receives his own choral theme song (a reworking of the theme for the classic Spider-Man animated TV series) arranged by composer Hans Zimmer. (Longtime Simpsons music vet Alf Clausen apparently wasn't a big enough name to handle the cinematic doings on the large screen, though Danny Elfman's familiar theme song is obviously included).

So the film lures us all in with Spider-Pig, and about a third of the way through the movie, he disappears. We all sit around through the end credits, laughing at the extra comedy bits such as Tom Hanks telling us to ‘just leave him alone' if we see him in public. The credits keep rolling, but no return of Spider-Pig. The film ends – perhaps one last hurrah before the cinema's canned radio station returns to the speakers? NO! Still no Spider-Pig!

So we got ripped off. The good news is that the rest of the film is actually pretty darned amusing. The opening fifteen minutes alone is chock full of more jokes than an average half-hour sitcom contains. And they're good. On the whole, The Simpsons Movie is funnier than the series has been for years. The media wondered aloud whether or not the film had been released too late to capitalize on the characters' popularity. (I remember the first rash of Simpsons-mania including a proliferation of Bart Simpson “Don't Have a Cow, Man!” T-Shirts. I was in high school. I am old.) Clearly, this was not the case. As long as it's funny, they will come.

In case you've been living under a rock for the past few decades, the Simpsons are a family of misfits hailing from the mysterious town of Springfield (which borders the States of Ohio, Nevada, Maine and Kentucky). Homer is a lazy, donut-worshipping lout who works at the local nuclear power plant. His wife Marge spends her time cultivating the gigantic blue shrubbery she calls a hairdo and wishing that her husband wasn't such a lazy, donut-worshipping lout. Their never-aging kids are equally polarized – saxophone-playing brainiac Lisa (Yeardley Smith) finds herself out of place in a town full of dolts. Her brother Bart (Nancy Cartwright) is keen on causing trouble and skateboarding nude through the town.

I was actually happy that the writers (including Groening, James L. Brooks, Mike Scully and countless others) avoided yet another tale about the power plant and its misanthropic vulture of an owner Mr. Burns (Harry Shearer), since that material has already been mined to death in the series proper. In its place, we have an ecological tale in the wake of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (lampooned in the film by activist Lisa and her presentation of ‘An Irritating Truth'). The town's Lake Springfield is polluted to the extreme (punk band Green Day perform on a barge to inspire awareness, but the acidic liquid topples the platform and burns them alive). The only good news for Lisa is that a sexy, nerdy activist from Ireland (named Colin, natch) moves to town, and she has someone to swoon over.

So does Homer – who falls in love with the aforementioned fat pig on a Krusty Burger ad shoot and hastily adopts him. When a trip to properly dispose of his sudden surplus of pig droppings crosses wires with the potential for free donuts, Homer instead opts to dump the fecal material in the already quarantined lake. The ensuing ecological nightmare (which is prophesied by Grampa Abraham Simpson in an early scene at the Church of Springfield) gets national attention, until President Arnold Schwarzenegger (who was elected “to lead, not to read”) agrees to give EPA director Russ Cargill permission to seal the town of Springfield within a gigantic Logan's Run type dome.

Homer and family then escape the clutches of their fellow townsfolk (swinging Tarzan-like from multiple nooses in what must be an homage to an early short involving Homer's neckties), who have turned into an angry mob upon discovery of his poop-pollution fiasco. With their home destroyed, the Simpsons turn their enormous eyes westward to the untainted wilderness of Alaska, where Homer can spend his days at Eski-Moe's bar playing games of Grand Theft Walrus. Snaking through all this is a subplot of responsibility, for Marge disapproves when Homer doesn't step up to the plate after they learn of an impending nuclear erasure of their beloved old town.

This leads to a surprisingly serious performance by Julie Kavner (a Tracy Ullman Show regular who's voiced the skyscraper-haired woman since the beginning.) during a videotaped Dear Homey Letter. There's also family strife in Bart's case, who is routinely let down by his father's lack of interest in just about anything. He longs for the idyllic family life led by his comically over-religious neighbors The Flanders, and considers mutinying into their fold.

Don't be fooled into thinking it's all cartoon gravitas, however. There's a ton of gags spread throughout the film (although it is a bit frontloaded), most of which are inspired. There's some fun, postmodern jabs at TV-to-film adaptations (during a screening of the Itchy & Scratchy Movie, Homer wonders why people would pay to see something they get for free every week and calls the entire audience “Suckers!”) and even papa network Fox themselves (there's a cute ‘advertising banner' that runs at the bottom of the screen during one segment). There's also a funny jab at Disney involving Bart with a bra on his head.

The film doesn't flaunt the obscenity immunity gained from a theatrical release, and apart from an off-camera sex scene between Homer and Marge (accompanied by numerous disgusted woodland critters), Bart's unit (in a hilarious segment aped from the Austin Powers series), an Inuit shaman with dangling mammaries (boob lady!) and a few instances of middle finger usage, there's hardly any obscenity on display. Though there is plenty of violence, so don't get too sad.

Overall, the film has a surprisingly coherent narrative flow, and smartly avoids trying to cram in every peripheral character (hasn't the series had enough years to do that already?) by focusing on the heart of the series – the family it's named after. The writing is the best we've seen in ages, the animation is good (if not remarkably superior to the TV show) and there are even a few fun cameos thrown in for good measure. If only there could have been more of a certain four-hooved, mud-wallowing dynamo.

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