The Simpsons Movie Doin' It Messy Style

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Is Matt Groening hedging his bets? Sure sounded like it when he called a press conference recently to talk about this summer's most talked-about movie.

The Simpsons creator put it out there that the film version of the megacult TV series will be deliberately "imperfect". so, like, if you don't like it, we knew you wouldn't like it anyway? Way to cover both cheeks, Groening.

Speaking in London, he said The Simpsons Movie was "a tribute to the art of hand-drawn animation, which is basically disappearing".

"All the animated movies these days are computer generated," he said, adding that his film had been created in "the old-fashioned, clumsy, 'erase it if you don't do it right' way".

"It's not a CGI movie with a thousand perfect penguins dancing in unison," he continued - a reference to Happy Feet, the winner of this year's Oscar for best animated feature.

Journalists at Wednesday's preview were treated to a 10-minute excerpt showing many familiar characters.

Scenes included naughty adolescent Bart Simpson skateboarding through the fictional town of Springfield naked and his intellectual sibling Lisa meeting a potential new boyfriend.

Another sequence depicted US rock band Green Day being booed off stage for expressing green concerns - a suggestion the film will have a topical environmental theme.

Groening, who first conceived The Simpsons in 1985, said the thinking behind the film was to include "everything we couldn't show on television".

Groening also addressed the curious question of why the Simpsons movie has become the mots long-overdue pop culture artifact since Guns'N'Roses "Chinese Democracy" album.

The idea for a Simpsons film has been percolating since 1992, said Groening, but only came to fruition recently.

" The idea started bubbling under in 1992, but at one point i thought it best to just focus on TV. As we were coming up to our 20th year and 400th episode, we finally decided to have a movie out," he said.

The show's executive producer Al Jean was quick to stress that you don't have to be a fan of the TV series to get the flick.

" The intent was that even if you've never heard of the Simpsons you can enjoy the film," he said.

"It was important to us that it be viewed as a separate entity."

Which put the barracuda-like Brit pop press on the attack with suggestions the release of the movie marks the beginning of the end for the venerable TV series.

Jean in particular got all hot about that.

"Emphatically no," said Jean, adding he hoped the film would "help the franchise and bring more people in".

Since the show's been running since '87, has global distribution and presumably some of its signals have reached at least the rim of outer space, it's unclear just where this new audience Jean implies will be coming from.