The Simpsons Anomaly

This week, America's first family finally makes the transition from television to the big-screen. The Simpsons has become a global phenomenon since it began nearly twenty years ago, generating over $2.5billion of revenue for Rupert Murdoch's Fox Network. In those two decades it has maintained its high standards, and remains one of the best shows on television. With its massive crossover appeal, sharp satire and rich tapestry of supporting characters to occupy the otherwise anonymous town of Springfield, its transition to the big-screen is perhaps long-overdue and certainly tentative. The film itself lacks the confidence of the show and struggles to get to grips with the cinematic format. Still, it remains head and shoulders above the competition.

The Simpsons Movie is something of an anomaly in contemporary cinema, as the bulk of the animation is created using traditional techniques. Of course, with the TV show having the status that it does, the use of CGI was never seriously considered for the production of the film. Although the film does utlise CGI for a handful of shots, all of which notably stand-out as cinematic in style, the movie is otherwise a traditonally-animated feature in a Hollywood where CGI has all but taken over.

When Pixar, with the backing of Disney, produced Toy Story back in 1995, the film became an instant industry landmark. As the first ever fully computer-animated feature, the industry was shown what was possible. Crucially, Pixar invested as much in the story dynamics as they did in the technology that brought it to life. As a result the film drew attention both for its significance as a feature-film, and for the intelligence and imagination of its screenplay, a key factor explaining its appeal to a crossover audience of both kids and adults. Pixar have since dominated the industry in the quality stakes, producing an excellent sequel to Toy Story, as well as films such as A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo.

Twelve years since Toy Story proudly took a bow, CGI has effectively claimed a monopoly over animated Hollywood. DreamWorks, having developed its own animation division, has established itself as Pixar's chief competitor, helped in large part by the massive success of the Shrek franchise, the first of which won the first Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2002. However, now that the technology has become commonplace, the crossover audiences are being increasingly abandoned. While the quality of the animation increases with each new release, the standard of writing - always the hardest part of any film production - has begun to fall. Over the last two or three years, cinema-goers have been inundated with a barrage of CGI features, most of them aimed squarely at the kids. Releases such as Madagascar, Over The Hedge, The Wild, Shark Tale and The Reef, tell very similar stories of animals in peril, and increasingly blur together before fading into oblivion. Each project usually finds big-name stars, all attracted by the minimum of fuss (no make-up or costume-fitting necessary, no waiting around for hours on-set), and an end product they can show the family.

Traditional animation is seen by many as old-fashioned, and is becoming increasingly irrelevant in Hollywood as CGI becomes the default setting. Japan's Studio Ghibli is responsible for recent releases Howl's Moving Castle and The Cat Returns, as well as influential classics Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, the only traditonally-animated films to be seen on general release in Europe and the US in the last few years. This is partly due to the old-school preferences of influential director Hayao Miyazaki. In the UK, even Aardman Animation, the home of Nick Park and Wallace & Gromit, is beginning to experiment with CGI. The recent Flushed Away saw characters created in the classic Aardman aesthetic, but put through a CG filter.

It seems likely that it may fall to the film industries of the Far East to rejuvenate traditional animation in Hollywood. Just as Japanese and Korean horror has heavily influenced an American counterpart hungry for ideas, perhaps the same will happen for animation. In the meantime, it seems that only a film with the iconic aesthetic of The Simpsons will appear on the big-screen without coming completely by way of a hard-drive.