The whole town is rocking to a rock performance on a floating stage. We’re not talking about Singapore catching the National Day Parade, but the cartoon denizens of Springfield lapping up Green Day (the real guys).
That’s how Matt Groening’s The Simpsons, the most dysfunctional family in the history of television is introduced to the big screen. And none too late for fans of the inimitably zany yellow family who debuted as shorts on the Tracey Ullman Show 20 years ago.

Green Day, speaking like the real-life environmentalists that they are (they’re involved in a environmental project known as Green Day + NRDC), attempts to beseech the town folk to abandon their polluting ways, only to be met by stiff opposition when the crowd begins pelting the band with rubbish. The additional waste in the lake corrodes the stage and causes it to sink. Well, not before Green Day pulls out a stunt from the 1997 blockbuster, Titanic, where the musicians on the stricken ship played to the bitter end, albeit to laughs from the audience this time round.

At the band’s funeral service, the usually asleep and most probably senile Grampa Simpson (voiced by Dan Castellaneta) suddenly gets a vision and predicts emphatically that a great catastrophe will befall them.

Later on in the film, Lisa Simpson (voiced by Yeardley Smith) gets her first case of puppy love with the new kid on the block, Colin (voiced by Tress MacNeille). The latter, like Lisa, is very passionate about protecting the environment and they both begin a gruelling campaign to get the ignorant town folk to prevent further pollution to LakeSpringfield.

But just as the town finally heeds Lisa’s doomsday predictions and decides to clean up its act and takes up new measures to quit soiling the lake; her father Homer (also voiced by Castellaneta), the town’s resident idiot decides to dump his newly acquired pet pig’s waste silo into the lake, which causes a giant environmental problem resulting in the town being enclosed in a gigantic glass dome, thanks to a game of Russian Roulette by the US president.

And so it’s left to Homer to right his wrongs and free the town from its sad imprisonment through a mad cap and utterly hilarious adventure that at one point, sees the family wind up in the frosty cold state of Alaska.

The Simpsons is undoubtedly, one of the most highly anticipated blockbusters of the year. After all, according to IMDb, the movie was even nominated for “Best Summer Movie You Haven’t Seen Yet” at the 2007 MTV Movie Awards only to be beaten by a movie that is also based on a well loved cartoon, Transformers.

While writers like Jon Bonné have argued on MSNBC that the series has been in decline in recent years. The Simpsons movie suggests otherwise, as it’s funny and laced with tons of sarcasm and highly insane antics that the series is renowned for. This is the series where its writers couldn’t help but poke fun at the possible differences between a Protestant and Catholic heaven.

The use of celebrity appearances and spoofs is a common feature within the series itself, and the producers were wise not to abandon that formula. As mentioned earlier, Green Day makes an appearance before their untimely demise, but the idea of portraying Californian governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (voiced by Harry Shearer) as president of the United States was a work of genius by the script writers. After all, when Arnie decided to select an option to solve the pollution crisis at Springfield without first reading the details, his line, “I was elected to lead, not to read,” was one of the defining jokes of the movie.

But truly, like the Transformer’s tagline, the movie was something that had “more than meets the eyes”. The relationship between Homer and bratty son Bart Simpson (voiced by Cartwright) was one that caught my attention. While their relationship is anything but normal (unless you consider strangling your child normal), the movie showed how their relationship developed over time to one that was extremely touching. After all like Bart says, despite Homer’s follies and lack of tender care compared to the Simpson’s ever religious neighbour Ned Flanders (voiced by Shearer) , “Hey, what can I say? My man knows me.”

All in all, the long wait for The Simpsons to finally come out on the big screen was definitely worth it. The movie is a comedic adventure that certainly lives up to it reputation and while it may be a tad short at 87 minutes (which is about 4 episodes long), it’s definitely worth the ticket price.

Rating: 4/5

Movie Details:

Opens: July 26
Running Time: 87min
Cast: Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright
Director: David Silverman