The Simpsons Movie
The Simpsons Movie is a 2007 animated comedy film based on the animated television series The Simpsons. It is produced by Gracie Films for 20th Century Fox with animation produced by Film Roman and Rough Draft Studios and was released worldwide July 27 2007. The film has been produced by James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, Al Jean, Mike Scully, and Richard Sakai and has been written by eleven of the television series' most prolific writers: Scully, Jean, Brooks, Groening, Ian Maxtone-Graham, George Meyer, David Mirkin, Mike Reiss, Matt Selman, John Swartzwelder and Jon Vitti. The film is directed by David Silverman, a former Simpsons supervising director. The film stars the regular television cast of Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria, Harry Shearer, Pamela Hayden and Tress MacNeille.
Contents
Plot
After a short Itchy & Scratchy cartoon, the film opens with Green Day playing at a concert at Lake Springfield. As they finish their song they try to talk about the environment, which angers the audience to throwing trash at them. The trash in the water dissolves Green Day's barge and it sinks, killing them. At the funeral, Grampa is possessed and begins to scream of a coming disaster. This leads Marge to believe that God is sending them a message warning them about a future catastrophe.
Later that day, after unsuccessfully trying to fix the roof. Homer and Bart play a game of dare in which Homer dares Bart to skateboard nude to Krusty Burger, and Bart gets in trouble with Chief Wiggum. Homer and Bart eat at Krusty Burger where Ned Flanders shows fatherly compassion towards Bart and Homer adopts a pig as a pet when Krusty orders it to be killed shortly after taping a commercial.
Meanwhile, Lisa starts to talk about the environment, with no success until she meets an Irish boy named Colin and they combine their efforts to give a talk called "An Irritating Truth" at Town Hall, after which the town decides to clean up the lake.
Marge realises Homer named the pig "Spider-Pig" and he keeps the pig's waste in a silo, which horrifies Marge, who tells Homer to dispose of it safely. While waiting in a queue at the dump Homer is told by Lenny that Lard Lad Donuts has been shut down and that they are giving away free donuts. Homer decides on a quicker means of disposal and dumps the silo into the lake, causing it to become heavily polluted. Shortly a squirrel falls in and is severly mutated. Nearby, Flanders and Bart bond during a hike and discover the mutated squirrel, which is captured by the EPA. Russ Cargill, head of the EPA, tells President Schwarzenegger that Springfield is so polluted that the government must take drastic action. He provides Schwarzenegger with five options and he picks one at random without looking, saying he was elected to "lead" not to "read". As a result, Springfield is concealed in a giant glass destruction-proof dome and is removed from the state map.
The police soon find the pig waste silo in the lake and within seconds an angry mob approaches the Simpson's home intending the kill the whole family. The family escapes through a sink hole, which then devours the Simpson's house, including the car, treehouse and even Santa's Little Helper's doghouse thanks to Homer's size. The Simpsons are soon declared on the run from every law and order state in America. Homer proposes that the entire family move to Alaska to which they eventually all agree on.
In Springfield, the townspeople are going crazy, running low on supplies, out of electricity, cut off from the outside air. They attempt to break the dome, this is witnessed by Russ Cargill from a security camera who tells the President that they can't keep Springfield in this state forever and Cargill asks the President to choose another plan out of five, but this time manipulates him to choose the plan to blow up Springfield.
In Alaska, the family sees an advertisement presented by Tom Hanks promoting a new Grand Canyon, to be located where Springfield is. Marge and the kids decide that they must save Springfield, but Homer refuses to help the town that tried to kill them. He comes back from a nearby bar the next day to discover Marge left a video tape. She has left with the kids to save Springfield and to prove she has ended their marriage, she taped over their wedding video. Homer is left heartbroken and shortly after he is visited by a mysterious Native American, Homer has a vision after much torturing and reaches an epiphany: he cannot survive without others, and must save Springfield and his family.
Meanwhile, Marge, Lisa, Maggie and Bart arrive at Seattle train station and are immediantely arrested by Cargill and the EPA. Homer soon discovers the family's capture and uses a crane to try and get them out after the truck stops at a crossing but with little success. Bart then succeeds in gassing himself and the whole family to sleep after protesting to the driver, waking up in Springfield next morning when Cargill appears on a giant screen on the dome and tells the townspeople that Springfield is to be destroyed and they will all be killed. A helicopter then arrives and opens a hole at the top of the dome, lowering down a bomb, timed at 15 minutes.
Homer climbs the dome and descends down the helicopter rope, ironically knocking the escaping town people and bomb off the rope. Homer is upset when Bart disowns him for this and accidentally kicks down the bomb, halfing its time limit, resulting in him being chased out of town again. Soon he notices a motorbike and grabs Bart who had just declared to be with the Flanders family, and they cycle up the side of the dome. Bart throws the bomb through the hole, detonating it and shattering the dome to pieces. Afterwards, Cargill appears and just when he is about to gun down Homer with a shotgun, he is knocked out by Maggie.
Everyone is safe except Dr Nick Riviera who is killed when he is impaled by a large piece of dome glass. Lisa is told by Milhouse that Colin died when they were away only for him to appear afterwards. The town praises Homer, who rides off with Marge on the motorbike into the sunset. The film ends with everyone rebuilding the Simpsons house and restoring things the way they were.
Production
Development
The production staff of The Simpsons had entertained the thought of a film since early in the series, but things never came together. The season 4 episode "Kamp Krusty" was originally going to be a film, but difficulties were encountered in writing a movie length script, at which point the movie plans were dropped in favor of a season premiere. For a long time the project was held up. There was trouble finding a story that was right for a film, and the crew did not have enough time to complete a film project, as they already worked full time year-round on the show. Before his death, Phil Hartman had always wanted to create a live action Troy McClure film, with several of the staff saying that they would have loved to help create it.
Work on the current script began in 2001, when the voice cast was finally signed on to do the film. The producers had arranged a deal with Fox, which meant that they could begin writing a film script, but then could abandon it at any point if "they weren't satisfied with the results." Work continued on the screenplay from 2003 onwards and did not cease. James L. Brooks said on the matter that the "fact that we could say no meant that we never had to. Al Jean told Newsweek, that "This movie has been rewritten more heavily than any human document. Numerous plots were considered: Al Jean suggested the family saving manatees, which became the 2005 episode "Bonfire of the Manatees", and there was the The Truman Show-style notion of the characters discovering their lives were a TV show, which Groening rejected due to his rule "that the Simpsons never become aware of themselves as celebrities. The writers wrote the script in a way that they almost always employed when writing the television series, sitting around a table and pitching ideas, trying to make each other laugh. Brooks noted that the writing process followed the pattern of "story, story, story and tone and character and emotion and pace.
The film was originally planned for release in summer 2006, but Al Jean stated at San Diego's Comic Con International 2004 that the producers were taking their time, to make sure that the film was perfect. In 2005, Nancy Cartwright told BBC Radio 1 that the cast had done their first table reading. It was not until April 1, 2006 that Twentieth Century Fox confirmed that The Simpsons was to be made into a feature-length film, to be released July 27, 2007.
Animation
The film is being animated in a wider 2.39:1 aspect ratio, and colored with the largest palette the animators have ever had available to them. The technique of animating the characters to have shadows is used throughout the film. On the subject of animation, David Silverman said that "In any given episode, there will be sequences you really want to lavish your attention on, and you've got to pick and choose" leading him to think that it "would be really great if we could lavish that attention with every single scene [in the film] that we do". As inspiration for the animation, Silverman and his team of animators looked at The Incredibles, Triplets of Belleville and Bad Day at Black Rock, calling them "a great education in staging because of how the characters are placed".
Although most animated films can not make any changes to the story for budget reasons, The Simpsons Movie crew continued to keep playing with their film even into 2007. James L. Brooks noted, "We saw a trailer the other day, and somebody said 70 percent of the things in it — based on where we were eight weeks ago — are no longer in the movie, because we keep on fooling around."
Casting
As inspiration for the crowd scene in the film, the production staff spent a long time looking at the Simpsons poster that features over 320 of the show's characters. Groening said that they did try to put every single character into the film, with 94 having speaking parts. The series regulars Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer and a majority of the show's semi-regular performers Marcia Wallace, Pamela Hayden, Russi Taylor, Tress MacNeille and Maggie Roswell reprised their roles for the film, as did Joe Mantegna for Fat Tony.
Various new characters were also created along the way, who were often written out as they didn't contribute much. Albert Brooks, who supplied many guest voices, played the Russ Cargill. Minnie Driver recorded the part of a patronizing grievance counselor in a scene that was cut, as were Isla Fisher and Erin Brockovich's scenes, and Kelsey Grammer's as Sideshow Bob as.
Music
Hans Zimmer was selected to compose the score for the film, with him composing for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End at the same time. He told The Hollywood Reporter that he liked "using all his creative juices at once." In addition to their appearance in the film, Green Day will record their version of the theme song of The Simpsons, releasing it as a single.
The soundtrack album of Zimmer's score will be released by Adrenaline Music, on July 24, 2007
- "Simpsons Theme"
- "Trapped Like Carrots"
- "Doomsday Is Family Time"
- "Release The Hounds"
- "Clap For Alaska"
- "What's An Epiphany?"
- "Thank You Boob Lady"
- "You Doomed Us All'Again"
- "Lead, Not To Read"
- "Why Does Everything I Whip Leave Me?"
- "Bart's Doodle"
- "World's Fattest Fertilizer Salesman"
- "His Big Fat Butt Could Shield Us All"
- "Spider Pig"
- "Reclessly Impulsive"
Marketing
A teaser trailer for the film was attached to the film Ice Age: The Meltdown from March 31 2006 onwards; the same trailer was then broadcast during the April 2 episode of The Simpsons, "Million Dollar Abie". In July 2006, two clips of early, black and white, unfinished animatic footage from the film were shown to audiences during a Simpsons panel at Comic-Con 2006, with a third animatic clip being released on the The Simpsons The Complete Ninth Season DVD boxset. A 1½-minute-long trailer was then shown on November 12, 2006, immediately after the second act of The Simpsons episode "G.I. (Annoyed Grunt)". Another 1½-minute trailer appeared on The Sun newspaper's website on December 11, 2006. On the February 14 2007, episode of American Idol, footage was shown of the contestants attending a private screening where they were shown an early preview of the first theatrical trailer. The same trailer was then shown during The Simpsons episode "Springfield Up" on February 18, 2007, and was made available online shortly afterwards. A short TV spot was then aired during the episode "You Kent Always Say What You Want".
McFarlane Toys will released a line of action figures based on the film, these include Ned Flanders and Bart looking over a rock at a character that is covered by a "Top Secret Character" logo. Others include Bart skateboarding naked having been dared by Sherri and Terri, Homer and his pet pig, and Itchy & Scratchy in "Presidential Politics". Also a series of "movie mayhem" figures, depicting the family in a cinema, were released. A video game entitled The Simpsons Game was released to coincide with the film's DVD release. Samsung released a special Simpsons Movie phone, and Microsoft will released a limited edition Simpsons Movie Xbox 360. Other merchandise that will be released includes a The Simpsons Movie donut-shaped stress reliever, as well as a badge pack.
As a promotion for the film, eleven 7-Eleven stores across America will be transformed into Kwik-E-Marts, and sell Squishees, Buzz Cola and Krusty-O's Cereal.
Release
The film is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for "irreverent humor throughout". The rating had been expected by the production staff.
Fox is holding a competition between sixteen Springfields across the United States to host the American premiere, with Springfield, Minnesota dropping out on May 31, 2007. Two Scottish Springfields have expressed their interest in holding the British premiere of the film.
Before its release, the film received a nomination in the category "Best Summer Movie You Haven't Seen Yet" at the 2007 MTV Movie Awards, but it lost to Transformers. The film's trailer won a Golden Trailer Award in the category "Best Animated/Family Film Trailer" at the 8th Annual Golden Trailer Awards.
Reception
In Portland, Oregon and later Tempe, Arizona, test screenings of The Simpsons Movie were held. The versions of the film shown included unfinished animation, music, and 3D effects, with the reviews being largely positive. The movie currently has an 89% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
External links
- The Simpsons Movie Official website
