The Simpsons Movie Is a Feature-Length Episode, and That’s the Point

The Simpsons Movie arrived in 2007 with a simple promise on its poster: “See our family. And feel better about yours.” For a television show that had spent 19 years defining what an animated family could get away with, the leap to 87 minutes of feature-length storytelling was always going to test whether Springfield’s sprawl could hold a single narrative without collapsing under its own weight.

Mostly, it does.

Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.

Homer, Plopper, and the Silo

The film opens at Lake Springfield, where Green Day plays a concert and then tries to talk to the crowd about the environment. The audience throws garbage at them instead. The polluted water eats through the band’s barge, and they drown. It is a blunt, funny cold open that sets the film’s engine: Springfield’s mess is real, and nobody wants to hear about it.

Lisa and her new boyfriend Colin hold a seminar and convince the town to clean up the lake. Grampa has a spiritual experience and prophesies a disaster involving a “twisted tail,” “a thousand eyes,” people “trapped forever,” and a final ominous “eepah.” Only Marge takes him seriously.

Homer adopts a pig he names Plopper, saving him from being slaughtered by Krusty the Clown at Krusty Burger. When Homer brings Plopper home, Marge identifies the pig as part of the prophecy and tells him to get rid of it. He refuses. His fawning over Plopper pushes Bart, already fed up with Homer’s carelessness, toward Ned Flanders as a father figure.

Then comes the silo. Marge orders Homer to dispose of an overflowing tank of Plopper’s feces, plus some of Homer’s own. He hears Lard Lad is giving away free donuts, gets distracted, and dumps the silo in the lake. A squirrel falls in and comes back mutated, bearing the “thousand eyes” Grampa warned about.

Russ Cargill and the Dome

Russ Cargill, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, tells President Arnold Schwarzenegger about Springfield’s pollution crisis and presents five solutions. Schwarzenegger picks the third option at random: sealing Springfield under a giant glass dome, trapping everyone inside.

The Simpsons become fugitives. The dome is the film’s best visual idea and its cleanest satirical target — a town punished for one man’s stupidity, governed by a bureaucrat who treats the whole thing as a menu choice. Albert Brooks voices Cargill, and he is the right kind of antagonist for this material: petty, pleased with himself, and entirely unbothered by the people underneath the glass.

A Cast of 98 Speaking Parts

The production staff referenced a poster featuring more than 320 Simpsons characters when building crowd scenes. Matt Groening said they tried to include every single character, with 98 having speaking parts, and most of the crowds being previously established characters rather than generic filler.

The regular voice cast — Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria, and Harry Shearer — all returned. So did semi-regulars Tress MacNeille, Pamela Hayden, Marcia Wallace, Maggie Roswell, Russi Taylor, and Karl Wiedergott. Joe Mantegna came back as Fat Tony. Albert Brooks, who had supplied many guest voices on the show, asked to be part of the film and was cast as Cargill.

For about a week, Brooks was set to reprise Hank Scorpio. When that character was cut, he voiced Cargill instead. The cast did the first of three table readings in May 2005 and recorded every week from June 2006 until the end of production. James L. Brooks directed them for the first time since the show’s early seasons. Castellaneta called the sessions “more intense” than recording the series and “more emotionally dramatic.” Some scenes, including Marge’s video message to Homer, were recorded over one hundred times, leaving the cast exhausted.

The Rewrite That Never Stopped

Development on a Simpsons film had been attempted before and failed for lack of a final screenplay. In 2001, after the voice cast agreed to do it, Groening, James L. Brooks, Al Jean, Mike Scully, and Richard Sakai began work. A writing team was assembled: Brooks, Groening, Jean, Scully, Ian Maxtone-Graham, George Meyer, David Mirkin, Mike Reiss, Matt Selman, John Swartzwelder, and Jon Vitti. They generated numerous plot ideas, and one of Groening’s was ultimately adapted.

The screenplay was rewritten over a hundred times, and the rewrites continued after animation began in 2006. Hours of finished material was cut from the final release, including cameo roles. That churn shows in the film’s structure — it moves in clean set pieces rather than one continuous build — but it also explains why so few scenes feel padded. Director David Silverman keeps the runtime at 87 minutes, and the film earns almost all of them.

What the Film Gets Right, and What It Doesn’t

The Simpsons Movie works best when it treats the dome as a physical fact. The town’s reaction, the family’s fracture, Bart’s turn toward Flanders — these are small, human problems given a giant glass ceiling. The film’s weakest stretch is its middle, where the fugitive plot loosens into travel and the satire thins out. The EPA is a fine target. Five options on a menu is a fine joke. Neither carries a full act.

Here is the schedule the film runs on, roughly:

The voice work is the film’s steadiest asset. Castellaneta, Kavner, Cartwright, Smith, Azaria, and Shearer have been these characters for so long that the performances carry no strain at all. Brooks as Cargill is the one new piece, and he slots in without upsetting the balance.

What matters most, in the end, is that The Simpsons Movie does not try to be more than it is. It is not a reinvention. It is an extended, well-built episode with a bigger canvas, a cleaner villain, and a pig. The tagline promises you will feel better about your own family. That is a modest promise, and the film keeps it.

The Simpsons Movie is a 2007 American animated comedy film based on the television series created by Matt Groening, directed by David Silverman, and written by a team that includes Groening, James L. Brooks, Al Jean, Mike Scully, Ian Maxtone-Graham, George Meyer, David Mirkin, Mike Reiss, Matt Selman, John Swartzwelder, and Jon Vitti. It runs 87 minutes.

7.0/10 (TMDB audience score, 8716 votes).

2007 films · animation · Homer Simpson · movie review · Simpsons · The Simpsons Movie