[Ghoulish Delight]

I must clarify, I wasn't looking for over-the-line edginess. Although I think that while Bart's doodle is edgy relative to early episodes, I don't think it (or anything in the movie) represents the same edginess relative to society that the early episodes did. But that's a whole other discussion.

What I mean by "more than just an episode" has more to do with actually creating something that matches the scale of the big screen on the whole. Boundary pushing is part of that, but only a small fraction.

To illustrate, I'll say that I think my favorite part was the opening bit. Not the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon itself per-se, but the self aware bit with Homer in the theater afterwards. That, far beyond anything else in the whole movie, showed a keen understanding of how to take the characters from the small screen and do something befitting the big screen. It used the medium in that beautifully self-aware, self-effacing way that The Simpsons once used television. But it peeked in the first 5 minutes and never returned to that. Boo-hiss I say.

That's not to say I wanted 90 minutes of Bart talking into the camera. But that opening got me all excited that they truly did something more than a 90 minute episode. So perhaps that's part of my perspective. In its first hit, it soared well beyond my expectations, and then very quickly plummeted back down to mediocre.