the simpson's movie

This week's rental was The Simpson's Movie.

I totally avoided this at the time it was released in the cinemas. The Simpson's kinda stopped being funny about 4 or five years ago, if not longer. The real problem was that they ran out of jokes. When a comedy show has been going for something like 20 years that's pretty much inevitable.

They've been repeating and recycling the same things for a good while now. And worst of all they seem to have taken their own format to a point beyond ridiculousness.

When the Simpsons started it was actually fairly standard in terms of its storytelling. For example it often tended to have "morals". Now I don't mean that in terms of it having morality - a sense of right and wrong - I mean that in the sense of having a bit at the end where someone goes "and the moral of the story is".

I've nothing wrong with cartoons educating, but I've always hated when they deliberately explain the point. It smacks of very poor story telling for one thing.

Anyway, from about the second season on they started to play with this format a lot. They stopped having "moral of the story" bits and instead just go with the flow. If anything characterised the Simpsons it was this flexibility of the format.

Some of would follow fairly normal narrative structure, but other stories would be totally non-sequitur in nature. You'd start off with one thing (homer trashes Lisa's saxophone) then end up somewhere else (homer stopping an alien invasion).

But generally these were kept in check. However, as the show progressed and they ran out of normal narratives, they all became non-sequitur. Recent shows it's like they're coming up with random gags (that they've probably already done) and short stories and simply trying to weld these together to make 22 minutes of screen time.

My fear then was that the film would be like this too and from that standpoint they succeeded. There is a much more consistent narrative story in the film - a plot you can follow and understand.

The problem is that they've done all of those, so it also feels like a mash-up of plots they've already done.

Also, there are a lot of logical failures. The most obvious is that the town ends up under a big glass dome. How comes they don't all suffocate? They hint that they run out of food and water, but it doesn't really seem like it. Why does no-one else in the country notice?

But worst of all, the dome doesn't go underground - it's just on the surface. So why doesn't anyone think of tunnelling out? Alright there's a bit where they say to put guards on, but that's is later on. Plus the residents of Springfield rebel later on and they try to crack the glass - none of them think to tunnel under? Especially when the end part comes and they could all dies. What, they just sort of stand and watch?

This is the problem with telling a story - if that's what you're doing it needs to make sense, and this didn't.

There are lots of other problems too. A severe lack of good jokes, for example. All of the good ones are in the trailers - that can't be a good sign.

Also there seemed to be too much of a desire to shoe-horn in all of the secondary characters from the series. I guess it's okay when they're in the crowd, but having little 'bits' for some of them feels very artificial when it's a plot-driven film.

One of the mistakes I think they made was testing the movie to audiences. It's almost like the fact it was animation acted against them. In a movie you couldn't reshoot the entire thing - just bits, but with animation you potentially could.

And from the commentaries it's sounds like they did. A lot. It also sounded like this toned down or removed a lot of the jokes and if nothing else a Simpsons Movie needs to be funny.