It's a little bit unfair to contrast the new Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie with the South Park franchise just because both involve cartoon characters saying things that cartoon characters normally don't say. But if you're a movie reviewer who hasn't spent much time watching ATHF's closer kin on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming block, such as Squidbillies (a Gelf favorite) or Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, a comparison of Frylock, Meatwad, and Master Shake to the foul-mouthed boys from a Colorado mountain town will have to suffice.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For those who still haven't seen it, ATHF isn't The Simpsons or even South Park. It does share a sense of the absurd with those animated anti-sitcoms. But, made on a relative shoestring budget (at Cartoon Network's Williams Street Studios, in Midtown), ATHF is even more random and surreal, with little regard for the basic laws of gravity—or space and time, for that matter.

Newsday
Unlike their South Park counterparts, they are less interested in spearing sacred cows of contemporary American culture than splaying wide the covert fantasy life of young heterosexual male cyber-nerds.

USA Today
It's nowhere near as funny or incisive as the South Park movies, and it has a much crazier style.

Slate
ATHF bears some resemblance to South Park (I'd love to see a Venn diagram of the two shows' overlapping audiences), but it lacks South Park's economical storytelling and ripped-from-the-headlines topicality.

New York Times
The point is not South Park-style topical satire—though Aqua Teen Hunger Force did make the news a while back when the Boston police mistook a promotional campaign for a terror threat—but rather endless riffing on pop culture minutiae.

Perhaps the Orlando Sentinel's Roger Moore sums up most (Adult Swim-free) critics' views best, when he writes, "To think we laughed at Boston. Then. They know a bomb when they see one."