Bob’s Burgers Fails To Learn From The Simpsons Movie

thegamer.com:

Bob’s Burgers and The Simpsons are indelibly linked. Both strive to highlight the ordinary lives of an American family, and it speaks to the growing class divide and economic downturn that the struggling Belchers represent the new normal, while The Simpsons, with two cars in the garage in a suburban neighbourhood on the salary of a single working man (despite some single episode stories, Marge has remained a stay at home wife), have long been outdated. Bob’s Burgers was attached to The Simpsons - and Family Guy - during Animation Domination, and began as the struggling newbie riding coattails before growing into the more reliable, consistently high quality toon compared to its cousins. They are similar in so many ways, but their movies feel very different.

At its simplest, The Simpsons Movie feels like a movie, while The Bob’s Burgers Movie feels like a long episode of Bob’s Burgers. I said that Bob’s felt like a long episode to my loving, ever supportive wife on the way out of the theatre, and she told me ‘that’s a bit of a lazy critique’, so allow me to explain. The Simpsons Movie is a movie because it feels like everything is bigger. The stakes are bigger, the set pieces are bigger, the emotional moments hit you harder. In The Bob’s Burgers Movie, it doesn’t feel like anything too different to what we’ve seen before.

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The central struggle is that the family is short on cash, which is hardly a new premise. Tina is unsure how she feels about Jimmy Jnr, also not new and given so little screentime it feels wedged in, and Gene feels… some kind of undetermined way about his fledgling music career but ultimately decides it’s fun. The only fresh plot is