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Parents' guide to, the simpsons movie.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 47 Reviews
Kids Say 300 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Same hilarious but in-your-face, edgy humor as TV show.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 12+?

Bart drinks an entire mini bottle of whiskey; Otto smokes a bong; Homer and his

For the most part, same as any episode: "ass," "hell," &quot

Besides the many painful gags involving Homer, a couple minor characters die (tw

Just well known fictional Springfield brands like Buzz cola, Duff beer, the Kwik

Bart skateboards naked -- his butt showing and a momentary penis shot. Homer and

Any Positive Content?

Homer has an epiphany that other people's feelings, especially his family&#3

Parents need to know that the movie breaks no new ground content-wise (except for showing Bart's tush and penis). The same hilarious -- but intentionally in-your-face -- levels of humor apply. The movie features a few more edgy words and sight gags, but nothing comes near, say, South Park levels. Minor characters and animals are crushed, kicked, and killed off, sometimes in groan-inducing ways. Bart gets drunk, Marge and Homer share a pre-coital scene, and there are lots of jokes that reference other movies and cultural events that might go over the younger audience members' heads.

To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Bart drinks an entire mini bottle of whiskey; Otto smokes a bong; Homer and his bar mates drink beer at Moe's (and other places as well).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

For the most part, same as any episode: "ass," "hell," "dammit," " cojones ," "crap," "god--m," "screw"

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Besides the many painful gags involving Homer, a couple minor characters die (two are smushed); a robot commits suicide; mobsters haul a dead body in a rug; an angry mob tries to lynch the Simpsons; and Homer, as always, strangles Bart.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Just well known fictional Springfield brands like Buzz cola, Duff beer, the Kwik-E-Mart, Krusty burgers, etc. Green Day and their song "American Idiot" are spotlighted.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Bart skateboards naked -- his butt showing and a momentary penis shot. Homer and Marge get into bed mostly undressed to make love (no nudity is shown).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Homer has an epiphany that other people's feelings, especially his family's, are just as important as his own. He acts selflessly for the first time, well, ever.

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (47)
Kids say (300)

Based on 47 parent reviews

The Simpsons Movie is for teens & adults.

We all enjoyed it, what's the story.

Springfield lovers have been waiting, like Homer drooling over an out-of-reach donut, more than 18 years for Matt Groening and James L. Brooks to get the merry geniuses behind The Simpsons to create a feature-length film. Finally, followers can see their beloved first family of animation on the big screen, and it was it worth the wait. Homer's ( Dan Castellaneta ) up to his usual tricks in THE SIMPSONS MOVIE when his selfishness (in this case, adopting a pig) triggers the worst emergency in Springfield's long and disaster-prone history. Meanwhile, Bart ( Nancy Cartwright ) starts wishing okalee-dorkily neighbor Ned Flanders ( Harry Shearer ) were his father, and Lisa ( Yeardley Smith ) falls for a young Irish activist. Marge ( Julie Kavner ), as always, sums up all her patience to deal with the latest family crisis.

Is It Any Good?

While The Simpsons Movie probably can't compare to any fan's favorite episodes, it's a triumphant collaboration of nearly a dozen of the series' best head-writers and producers. The result is a film that's true to its episodic roots -- tons of characters, A-list cameos, meta references -- but also appealing to even the casual or non-viewer.

Simpsons adventures are really best seen and not explained. Even a straightforward visual gag, like Bart skateboarding in the buff or Ned preparing a cup of hot cocoa, is side splitting. And then there are the deliciously intricate crowd -- or more accurately, mob -- scenes when primary, secondary, and occasional characters mix seamlessly together. Ahhh, sweet, sweet laughter. The audience at several points roared so loudly that it was hard to hear the dialogue. But you don't have to be a line-memorizing Comic-Book Guy to enjoy the film. Even the uninitiated or usually unimpressed should find plenty of opportunities to laugh so hard you cry during the 86-minute treat. Be warned though, you won't be able to stop humming "Spider-Pig" once the end credits (a perk for those who stay 'til the very end) roll.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the impact of The Simpsons on popular culture. Is the animated show's popularity even greater than that of Spider-Man , Pirates of the Caribbean , and Harry Potter ? Is it wrong to show Bart drinking? What would really happen if a 10-year-old drank a miniature bottle of alcohol? Parents can also discuss caring about the environment and how even one person's actions make a difference.

Movie Details

In theaters : July 27, 2007
On DVD or streaming : December 18, 2007
Cast : Dan Castellaneta , Julie Kavner , Nancy Cartwright
Director : David Silverman
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Twentieth Century Fox
Genre : Comedy
Run time : 86 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : irreverent humor throughout.
Last updated : September 13, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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'The Simpsons' is changing with the times. But it's always done that — if you've been watching.

$Image: Matt Groening Celebrates 500th Episode Of \"The Simpsons\" With Star On The Hollywood Walk Of Fame$

"The Simpsons'' has changed. The show takes plenty of knocks for misbegotten portrayals of ethnic and sexual minorities, which creator Matt Groening acknowledged in a recent interview with BBC News on the topic , and it has shifted dramatically over the years, both with the times and in response to those criticisms. But in part because of its warts, it’s a remarkable history of the end of the 20th century.

Rewatching decades’ worth of “The Simpsons” over the course of a few months (which I’ve been doing, now that all 32 seasons of the show (except the Season 3 premiere, “Stark Raving Dad,” guest-starring Michael Jackson) are on Disney+) is a strange and mostly wonderful experience. It often involved reliving forgotten viral news stories mentioned by the show obliquely or in parody — like “ Bart vs. Australia ,” in which Bart is sentenced to be “booted” by the Australian prime minister, an episode-long travesty of a news story about American teenager Michael Fay who was caned by Singaporean authorities as punishment for vandalism.

Opinion Rather than hiding its racist cartoons, Disney needs to teach people about them

Weekly television sitcoms were never intended for archival preservation ; many of the earliest shows had their tapes reused, their originals lost in studio fires, or were just thrown in the trash. But fairly early into its historic run, “The Simpsons'' became something that its fans wanted not just to discuss, but to retain. More than any other show, it has one foot in the era of disposable television and the other in our current re-viewing culture. It’s an incredible lexicon of solid-gold throwaway gags, note-perfect performances, cultural detritus and our society's ugly biases — a detailed snapshot of America at a given moment.

In rewatching, it can be jarring to see a parody of an event that would be portrayed totally differently now (and perhaps should've been portrayed differently then), like in 1994’s “The Boy Who Knew Too Much.” That episode follows Bart as he wrestles with the knowledge that the drunken nephew of Mayor Quimby is innocent of assaulting a waiter at a party. It’s a parody of the trial of Kennedy family scion William Kennedy Smith, who had been charged with raping a woman he met at a bar in Florida while out with Ted Kennedy, his uncle, over Easter weekend in 1991; he was acquitted that December. (Over a decade later, his employers revealed — during a lawsuit claiming Smith had raped his personal assistant in 1999 — that they had previously settled two sexual harassment claims against him out of court. The assault suit was dismissed by a judge in 2005.)

if you watch hundreds of episodes of “The Simpsons” over a few months, you'll notice that, like Groening, its attitudes don’t move toward our current enlightened state in a straight line.

And as the characters have remained static, “The Simpsons” has accidentally become a sad commentary about the decline of the country on the other side of the screen. At the start of the show in 1989, Homer was the typical everyman with three kids, a wife who didn’t work, two cars and a house he owned. By the end of the third season, it was firmly established that he was also a shiftless boob comfortable in a dead-end job who married the girl he got pregnant in high school (from which he did not graduate) and never went to college. In 2021, these early episodes look like period pieces about a time of unimaginable prosperity, when the dumbest beer jockey in the land could live such a wonderful life on a single income. (Eventually, there are jokes about this , too.)

“The Simpsons,” for all that it outraged conservative in the 1990s, portrays and sometimes seems to endorse racial and sexual attitudes that aren’t always of a piece with what we like to think of as contemporary progressivism. Charges of racism have been a persistent hum in the background of its fandom for years, and its creators have responded somewhat slowly to those criticisms. White actor Hank Azaria retired Apu, the Indian convenience store clerk in 2018 after comedian Hari Kondabolu released his 2017 documentary "The Problem with Apu" to critical acclaim . More recently the show recast a Black character, Dr. Hibbert, who had been one of Harry Shearer’s dozens of voices and will now be performed by Kevin Michael Richardson, a Black actor (Shearer is white), after a variety of other cartoons of a more recent vintage had done the same in response to the era, and to criticism .

Opinion Black cartoons with white voices: Hollywood's other blackface problem

"Bigotry and racism are still an incredible problem, and it's good to finally go for more equality and representation,” Groening told the BBC about the changes. It’s a relief to see Groening willing to admit mistakes and change the show’s framework to respond to good-faith criticism.

But if you watch hundreds of episodes of “The Simpsons” over a few months, you'll notice that, like Groening, its attitudes don’t move toward our current enlightened state in a straight line.

The treatment of LGBTQ people on “The Simpsons,” for example, progresses and then regresses before it progresses again. (The LGBT podcast Gayest Episode Ever made a two-hours-and-change supercut of all the gay jokes on the show. Some of them are tough to watch.) There’s a very earnest episode — Season 8’s “Homer’s Phobia,” with John Waters as the family’s gay friend — but then, as LGBT rights become a more public issue, the show’s gags about sexuality get meaner and meaner.

As the characters have remained static, “The Simpsons” has accidentally become a sad commentary about the decline of the country on the other side of the screen.

At one point, perhaps its nadir, Homer zings his gay sister-in-law Patty by telling her he’ll vote against a law that would allow her and her girlfriend to adopt kids. As with everything on “The Simpsons,” it’s a smarter joke than it sounds — Patty then twists Homer’s arm behind his back until he sobbingly recants and admits he doesn’t vote — but part of the shock is that Homer is such a reliable everyman. That he’s willing to say such an ugly thing to Patty is a pretty good indicator of, at least, where the writers of the show believed popular sentiment was in 2006, when the episode aired. Homer is wrong about pretty much everything, but he’s supposed to be sympathetic.

Some prefer to just memory-hole media that has become hard to watch — toss out the bathwater, baby be damned — including other showrunners trying to address bigoted portrayals in their own archives. “30 Rock” creator Tina Fey asked that four episodes that show its characters in blackface be removed from streaming services ; five “South Park” episodes that sneeringly depict Islam’s prophet Muhammad are gone as well. Should “The Simpsons,” too, be scrubbed of more than just its Michael Jackson episode?

Opinion We want to hear what you THINK. Please submit a letter to the editor.

I don’t think so. Even leaving aside the persnickety archivist-nerd culture of the show’s fandom, there’s something valuable in being forced to think about the biases that made us laugh at jokes that make us cringe now. When the depictions are clumsy, accidentally racist or simply bad, they represent who many of us — definitely me — were when those shows were made, and I don’t want to forget that about myself. It runs the other direction, too: It’s humbling to watch a 25-year-old episode of television that’s not just ahead of its time, but of ours. If there’s one thing 32 years of “The Simpsons” demonstrates, it’s that mores change, and not always for the better.

The problem with history — of America, of television in general, and of “The Simpsons” — isn’t that we remember the shameful parts of it too clearly. It's that we too often go to extraordinary lengths to forget it.

Sam Thielman is a reporter and critic based in New York. He is the creator, with film critic Alissa Wilkinson, of Young Adult Movie Ministry, a podcast about Christianity and movies, and his writing has been featured in The Columbia Journalism Review, The Guardian, Talking Points Memo and Variety. In 2017 he was a political consultant for Comedy Central's "The President Show."

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The Simpsons Movie

Where to watch.

Watch The Simpsons Movie with a subscription on Disney+, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

The Simpsons Movie contains the hearty laughs, biting satire, and honest portrayal of an American family that makes the show so popular. And it boasts slicker animation and polished writing that hearkens back to the show's glory days.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

David Silverman

Dan Castellaneta

Homer Simpson

Julie Kavner

Marge Simpson

Nancy Cartwright

Bart Simpson

Yeardley Smith

Lisa Simpson

Hank Azaria