Featuring the voices of Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Harry Shearer, Hank Azaria, Nancy Cartwright, and Yeardley Smith. Rated PG.

Don't question my Simpsons credentials. I was there at the beginning, baby, when everyone's favourite yellow family started out as filler on The Tracey Ullman Show. I stuck with it until the past few seasons, when the writing became more slack while "guest appearances" soared into the absurdosphere.

This preamble, best delivered in the finicky tones of Comic Book Guy, is my way of saying that The Simpsons Movie really isn't anything to leave home about. Sure, you won't be sorry you saw the damn thing. It's as funny as any three or four latter-day episodes strung together which is pretty much what happens in a film credited to a dozen top Simpsons writers and directed by David Silverman, responsible for the show's famous opening-credit sequence.

What's strange about the 87-minute movie is that there's nothing strange about it. You'd figure that after 18 years of pushing boundaries, tweaking the status quo, and just generally being a Zeitgeist trickster, the big-screen version should hit a few buttons it hadn't already worn out on free TV.

Sure, series creator Matt Groening gets to josh his pal Al Gore by titling an environmental lecture from Lisa (voiced by Yeardley Smith) An Irritating Truth. Then, when Homer (Dan Castellaneta) pollutes Lake Springfield with the droppings from his beloved new pet pig and the town is shut down by a ruthless Environmental Protection Agency, you can almost smell the filmmakers hedging their political bets. (Especially when the EPA chief a lively Albert Brooks turns out to be more fascistic than the president of the United States, who, let's just say, is a former citizen of Austria.)

Homer's eco-boner eventually forces the family to flee to the wilds of Alaska, prompting the only segment to display any visual imagination. (There's a Disney-taunting element here that's quite satisfying, too.) But this plot turn effectively wipes away all the non-Simpson characters, leaving the focus too much on Mr. D'oh. There's some side business with Bart (Nancy Cartwright) wondering if Ned Flanders (Harry Shearer) might not be better dad material, Lisa gets a romantic subplot that's essentially thrown away, and more than Marge's hair gets blue when she (Julie Kavner) finally admits what an idiot her husband is. Okay, but I need more Moe, Sideshow Bob, and Professor Frink to really get my Simpsons on.

And no Bouvier sisters whatsoever? I guess some do-gooder antismoking group got to them before we could.