Don’t know about you but I’ve been a little nervous about The Simpsons Movie. Can’t ever remember so desperately wanting a movie not to fail, and for the sake of those responsible as well as my own enjoyment.

So good news today that someone over at AICN has seen a rough, early edit and posted up a review of the work in progress. Edited highlights below:

The easiest way to describe the film is by way of it’s three acts. They roughly split up into; the first half hour, the second half hour, and the final quarter hour-ish of climax.

The first half hour of the Simpsons movie is hysterical genius. It’s classic. It’s old school. It’s violent. It’s slapstick. It’s clever. It’s everything you could ever want it to be. There’s a gag every couple of seconds (sometimes several going on in the background), and pretty much all of them hit the mark with confidence and accuracy. I haven’t laughed so hard in ages (definitely not since Hot Fuzz). Seriously. My head almost fell off.

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The second half hour is a problem. Here we are attempting to further the plot, and add some conflict and exposition. It’s not that it’s bad, just that it isn’t really as good. The gag rate drops right off, and (shockingly for such a short movie) it feels a little slow. There’s some good moments in there of course, but it just seems to lose it’s zap and it’s zing. Here we could have done with branching off from the main story line and returning to perhaps some of the supporting characters for some laughs, some fun-poking, and some humour for humour’s sake. Padding if you will.

There is one stand out scene in this middle section which is utterly inspired, and where you get to see Bart at his comedy best, but even if I wanted to describe it I couldn’t do so and maintain the humour. You’ll just have to go see it wontcha?

The final short act, where the climax is played out, and everyone learns a valuable lesson, is exciting, clever and extremely satisfying. It definitely ends well, if a little abruptly. It all wraps up pretty neatly, and the animation here is superb, mixing high quality 2D and 3D to outstanding effect.

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People keep asking me: “so is it any good, or is it just like a longer episode?”. I say, if you pick some of the truly classic episodes, then a longer version is exactly what we wanted. What we got feels like they weren’t quite sure how to create a 90 minute episode, so they did one episode for comedy, one for plot, and one for the ending. I say we got three episodes back to back, and they all feel slightly different.

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