Maggie Simpson dans « Le Réveil de la Force après la sieste »

I was looking forward to this for most of the day (it's Star Wars Day and Disney now owns both Star Wars and The Simpsons). Maggie previously knocked it out of the park with her first short The Longest Daycare, and Playdate with Destiny is a bit underrated. The Force Awakens from Its Nap feels a bit lazy in comparison. No effort is made to explain how Maggie enters this world; she simply crosses the street from the Ayn Rand School for Tots. In a Star Wars-themed daycare, the only genuine laugh comes from Maggie's handling of the Death Star, which lampoons the films effectively. The plummeting Disney stock was also an attempt at subversive humour. But the ending doesn't come close to the cleverness of that in The Longest Daycare, which The Force Awakens from Its Nap is really a pale imitation of. Aside from the underwhelming story and jokes, the animation and all technical aspects of this film are top notch.

Just a short review here, given that the film is just a three-minute short that landed on Disney Plus on Star Wars day of 2021.

Continuing the trend of Maggie Simpson shorts revolving around the daycare facility, this time she forgoes the Ayn Rand school and instead is dropped at the Star Wars themed one next door. Inside, Asoka is given unruly children a time out in Carbonite and the many limbs of General Grievous are used to change diapers. Maggie comes to clash with her old nemesis Gerald, who now is in a form of a classic Sith Lord.

Without wishing to go too far in either direction, this short is in a word, alright. There are a number of mildly amusing little ideas and cameos in the three-minute runtime, but nothing coming anything close to the type of invention that we've seen "Robot Chicken" or "Family Guy" delve into over the years. I really felt the ending could have been much better, but I applaud the effort even if the previous Maggie shorts have been much better.

This was probably what an intern had to turn in to try and keep their position. Storyless, pointless.

This was just a short gag reel. There was no point to the story. Yeah, we get it, they're just messing around while making some extra bucks by using the platform's audience, hooking both The Simpsons fans and Star Wars fans for a few minutes. No objections to the commercially-driven format with these shorts, and the artwork is quite alright.

But we DO need something solid even under the most gone-bananas cartoons. Some underlying critisim, homage or appreciation. I don't see that in this one. It even lacks the proper setting of time and space (not talking about the SW time-space, but the one WE as the audience might take as a point of reference) to establish this on.

Family Guy does similar things, even crazier and nastier ones, but they have a sharp attitude, some eye from the outside, an element that brings with the joy of roasting a franchise.

The Simpsons merging with Star Wars is... Well... Pot not even calling the kettle black...

This was a rather pointless affair if truth be told.

Why it took so many writers to produce it I'll never know, because while yes, there are some nice visual gags, it's all rather pointless.

I don't mind these shorts if they are done well, but having Maggie as the focus of another one feels like extending a joke that didn't overly/just about worked previously and trying to make the 'magic' happen again.

More Simpsons content is always welcome, but it has to be done right, and I'm not sure this one really was when looked at on reflection.

I'm sure 'Star Wars' fans will look at it fondly. It has more gags than the sequel trilogy, that's for sure.