It's nice reuniting with old friends. "The Simpsons," television's longest running animated show, has been on for 18 seasons. I religiously watched for half of them; then the show, never seeming to be able regain the consistency of the first six or seven seasons, lost me. The opening section of The Simpsons Movie, the long-awaited big-screen debut of America's most recognizable dysfunctional family (the bright yellow skin probably helps), is a fine reminder of why I loved the show so many years ago. It starts off a big-laugh-a-minute affair—visual gags, pop culture references, satirical jabs at big targets, meta-fictional self-parody abound. In other words, they save their "A" game. There is so much gusto, such a willingness to go for broke and not look back, that it seems too good to be true. As is often the case with such situations, it is. As much energy as the movie's first act of nonsensical, random humor has, The Simpsons Movie falls into the trap so many features transitioning from the small screen have: It thinks too big in the wrong places. A plot forms and grows out of hand, and the humor, so fast and furious in the first half hour, takes the passenger seat.

After a gem of an "Itchy & Scratchy" short (that's followed with observation, "I can't believe we're paying to see something we see on TV for free"), the town of Springfield is watching Green Day (the boys lend their voices) perform. The band thinks there's a problem with pollution in town, and only Lisa (voice of Yeardley Smith) agrees. Following a funeral, she begins a petition to clean up the lake. Meanwhile, Marge (voice of Julie Kavner) tries to interpret Grandpa Simpson's (voice of Dan Castellaneta) doomsday ramblings at the funeral, while Homer (Castellaneta again) and Bart (voice of Nancy Cartwright) start off doing household chores, which leads to a game of dare, which leads to Bart being arrested for indecent exposure. Bart's had it with Homer and starts to look to his religious neighbor Ned Flanders (voice of Harry Shearer) for a better father figure. Homer gets a pig ("Spider-Pig," for whom he writes a theme song, later done as a hilarious choral piece), and even after the town blocks off the polluted river with an idiot-proof barricade, dumps a silo of the hog's "leavings" in the lake, causing the EPA (headed by Albert Brooks' sneaky bureaucrat) to enclose the town in a dome.

Let us takes some time to do as the screenplay should have done and ignore the plot. When they come, the laughs are big. The 11 screenwriters (including the show's creator Matt Groening and executive producer James L. Brooks) don't shy away from upping the stakes on the gags, and regular series director David Silverman makes sure the timing is sharp.