After years or speculation in the 90s, Matt Groening and company finally surprised audiences with a teaser trailer for The Simpsons Movie in early 2006.  For more, the movie couldn’t come soon enough and July 27 was marked in their calendars as a day of celebration, the day they would finally see their beloved 18 year old yellow family make their way to the big screen and, for the first time, in widescreen format.

With the show, proper, turning the “legal age” of 18, the creators of the Simpsons attempted to push the envelope in several parts of the movie, with slight nudity, drug use, profane hand gestures and minor language.  The problem?  It just wasn’t enough.  Although The Simpsons is a cartoon, it’s audience has grown up and, I personally was looking for the once risqué show to break new grounds once again, which is a difficult feat following the enormous success of the South Park movie.  The movie, unfortunately, just wasn’t as funny as it should have been.  Some jokes were recycled from previous episodes (as were plots) and others just fell flat as if they forgot to add in a punchline.

The main story (of an armageddon-type calamity that only effects the town of Springfield) is told in it’s entirety but the movie moves so briskly that all the subplots are never fully fleshed out.  Budding love stories, a brief encounter the town has with Mr. Burns, a troubled marriage and a boy losing faith in his father all have great setups but never go anywhere and, in turn, feel unjustified.  Groening tried so hard not to anger any fans of the show by not including their favorite characters that he lost focus on the story in order to fit as many in as possible (There are little or no lines for such favorites as Wiggum, Otto, Skinner, Moe and others).  Most characters are shown in quick passing through one of the many sweeping computer shots that distract away from the beauty of the hand drawn animation.

Overall, The Simpsons Movie plays out as 4 episodes cropped of commercials, mixed up and sewn together while leaving out some key story points.  You get to see a lot of characters briefly and the town of Springfield more than in most of the episodes but that just makes it feel like a slightly-less satisfying version of The Simpsons Road Rage on Playstation 2.