The Simpsons: The Longest Daycare

Maggie Simpson's daycare is far from pleasant...

Maggie Simpson spends a day at the Ayn Rand Daycare Center where she is diagnosed at an average intelligence level. Longing to be grouped with the gifted children, Maggie finds her destiny by rescuing a lonely cocoon from Baby Gerald, who is busy smooshing butterflies.

Peter Howell: Maggie Simpson in “The Longest Daycare” (David Silverman): The youngest member of the Simpsons clan is sent to the Ayn Rand School for Tots, a place where she’ll have to learn to deal with the type of bullies who await her in the grown-up world. It’s cute — there’s a good joke about Goodnight, Moon — but it feels like an interlude to a full-length Simpsons episode by Fox.

Steve Pond:
Yes, the Simpsons have crashed the Oscars. Although "The Simpsons Movie" didn't receive a nomination in 2007, its director, David Silverman, is back with a short film in which pacifier-sucking Maggie is sent to a daycare center: the Ayn Rand School for Tots. There, the gifted children are ruthlessly separated from the merely normal, and Maggie must help a caterpillar live long enough to escape from a bug-squashing kid and a specimen-collecting principal.
Like most things Simpsons-related, "The Longest Daycare" is satiric and smart and weird; it's a silent movie riffing on prison-escape movies, with Maggie as a cross between Buster Keaton and Steve McQueen.
The biggest hurdle it faces is its identification with TV's longest-running series and the strength of its brand name. As Pixar and Aardman's Nick Park have learned in the past, once voters in this category perceive you as playing in the big leagues, they tend not to vote for you anymore.

Likeliest winners: "Head Over Heels," "Adam and Dog"
If the voters can forget about who made them: "Maggie Simpson in 'The Longest Daycare,'" "Paperman"
Delicious, but not nourishing enough: "Fresh Guacamole"