The universe has been explored...

Rating: 3/10 (23 January 2008)

The Simpsons has often capitalized on its medium, and when it was first aired on The Tracy Ullman Show and shortly thereafter in a regular television spot, its uniqueness as a cartoon adult sitcom allowed such tags as "D'oh!" and "Don't have a cow!" to actually be considered subversive. If those lines no longer make you dizzy with laughter, then this movie will leave you disappointed.
This is because The Simpsons Movie blandly reheats almost twenty years of this family's dysfunction--Homer's loutish carelessness reacts unfavorably with (pick one or more) Marge's anxieties, Bart's need for a father, Lisa's hodge-podge of social causes, and Maggie's no-longer-cute-and-now-just-plain-annoying highly advanced reasoning and fine motor skills--and somehow feels the great urge to commit to an 84-minute rehearsal of its basic themes. The television show is actually poorer for the advent of this movie, since the latter brought into sharper relief the basic flaw in a show that once claimed to be different from the rest of the trash on TV (Matt Groening's words) by positing an animated universe in which anything could happen.
If "anything" can happen in this universe, why are we being served the same threadbare stock situations or character-driven plots of the early 90s? How is the sappy reuniting of Homer and Marge after a period when their marriage is put under pressure by buffoonery at all different from any other sitcom? What does the movie offer that we couldn't get from watching an episode on television, or even the two-part "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" (a much more successful "movie")? More money for its producers? The truth is that "unlimited possibilities" cannot be conveyed by any one kind of medium, for in order to make it intelligible, we have to add the content that necessarily limits it. A cartoon world is still a world, after all, and if "random" or "zany" has come to be expected, it becomes a norm, and hence very much self-limiting.
Sadly, by regurgitating and then flogging all of the show's underlying premises, The Simpsons Movie took some of the shine off the nostalgia I've always felt for Springfield.