Cartoon Brew has been complaining about the Aqua Teen Hunger Force cynical cash in movie, and probably for good reason.

ATHF works as a 10 minute show ... but the very idea of watching 2 hours straight makes my brain melt.

I've never understood the compulsion to translate shows from one form factor to another. (Okay, it's all about money, but humour me, ok?)

The cadence of 10 minute shorts compared to self-contained 30-minute shows or a 90 minute feature film are very, very different. And when a show's success is very reliant on the format, it becomes difficult to transition from one medium to the other.

It's not an animation specific problem, but there aren't as many live TV shows being converted into movies these days, so the problem is most apparent in the animation industry.

The closest thing I've seen to a successful film transistion is the South Park movie -- where they used the device of a musical to slow down the story-telling process.

But I'm worried about the Simpsons movie. It looks like it's going to suffer from the same problems as every TV-show-to-movie conversion: a need to impose a three-act structure, artificially accelerated character development and to cap it all off, probably a new villain figure who will never appear in the "regular" show.