[Beware: spoilers]

Read James Bone's report from the world premiere in Springfield, Vermont

So, after 18 years, 400 episodes, a few million branded lunchboxes and an inviolable place in the pop cultural consciousness of the planet, The Simpsons finally make it to the big screen. Strangely, the key question is not whether their efforts in this zany environmental parable are witty, funny and sweetly moving – creator Matt Groening and his crack team of ten seasoned Simpsons writers have seen to that with ruthless efficiency. No the real question here, and the one that Groening himself has repeatedly posed during the project’s long gestation, is whether The Simpsons Movie can justify itself as a big screen experience. The answer? Well, it’s a tough call.

For a start, The Simpsons Movie is such a fulsome comedic experience, so dense with one-liners, sight gags and self-referential allusion, that it’s almost unsettling. Within the first ten minutes we’re treated to rapid-fire gags about cartoons, about cartoon feature films, about Hillary Clinton, about Christianity, senility, fast food advertising, small town moralising and closet homosexuality, to name but a few.

Then, slowly, the plot begins to emerge from a giddy fog of belly laughter. It describes Homer’s neglect of Bart in favour of an adopted pet pig, his accidental pollution of Springfield’s lake with a silo of pig manure and the subsequent sealing off of the now poisoned Springfield under a giant glass dome by a sinister environmental protection agency. It culminates with the potential annihilation of Springfield itself and the eventual banishment of the Simpson family, with just a hint of a possible heroic return.

This, of course, is delivered with the kind of brash and brusque confidence that only a comedy institution could confer. Thus digs are made at some summer blockbusters (Homer calls his pig both ‘Spider-Pig’ and ‘Harry Plopper’) while others are gamely referenced – the crawling shadows of Independence Day and the bomb-in-the-hole finale of Star Wars are both smartly ripped. Enemy studio Disney, unsurprisingly, receives a snide kicking from the Fox-sponsored Bart (he calls it an evil corporation), even as the ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’ sequence from Dumbo is duly aped during Homer’s psychedelic trip with a Native American Shaman.

The emotional dynamics of the television show are also recreated with effortless aplomb, as Homer’s parenting of Bart is thoroughly questioned, as is his love for Marge. The latter crisis produces one of the sweetest exchanges in the film. “I just try and make the day not hurt until I can crawl back into bed with you,” says Homer, explaining his credo to his exasperated spouse.

And yet, and yet. It just doesn’t quite work as a cinema experience, even though the filmmakers have clearly been careful to adjust the form to match the format – they’ve given the characters shadows, they’ve made full use of the widescreen frame and some of the concepts, like the apocalyptic giant dome, are clearly too ‘big’ for television. But despite this, or perhaps because of it, it seems that in opening up the Simpsons for the big screen, Groening and Co have unwittingly exposed the cracks in their Simpsons machinery. The key character of the pig, for instance, simply disappears halfway through the film. Elsewhere Grandpa’s pivotal opening scene premonition (where he predicts the bones of the movie’s plot) is initially given huge narrative weight and sets up a crisis of religious faith for Marge. But this too is simply dropped midway through the story. Meanwhile Lisa’s burgeoning romance with a visiting preteen Irish environmentalist called Colin is vaguely handled and drifts in and out of the plot with little real intent. This lack of narrative causality is clearly pivotal to the shoot-from-the-hip energy of the 24-minute television show, and indeed is part of its charm, but the vagaries of film logic somehow demand more.

Which ultimately means that The Simpsons Movie is funny, clever and at times even hilarious (Bart skate-boarding naked through Springfield has to be the sight-gag of the summer). But sadly, it’s also a minor movie and never more inspiring than the sum of its admittedly witty parts.

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