The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants

The Courage of a Kitchen Sponge

I'll admit it: I figured SpongeBob SquarePants had finally run out of steam. Twenty-five years, a mountain of episodes, and three earlier movies will do that to a character. At some point the little yellow optimist starts to feel less immortal than mechanically durable, built to replay the same handful of notes for a fresh batch of sugar-rushed kids. So I was caught off guard by what Derek Drymon does in *The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants*. Instead of inflating the stakes again, he pulls everything back to kid size. No apocalypse. No grand crisis over the secret formula. SpongeBob just wants to be tall enough to ride a roller coaster. He wants to be a "big guy."



Drymon is about as qualified as anyone alive to guide this thing. He worked with the late Stephen Hillenburg from the show's 1999 beginning, and he clearly knows that SpongeBob only works when the innocence stays intact. Cynicism kills this world fast. Turning that frantic 2D energy into 3D usually sands off a character's soul. We've all seen those shiny, dead-eyed reboots of old Saturday morning staples. But Reel FX found a wonderfully strange angle here. The digital models look like cheap, tactile plastic toys from the 1960s. SpongeBob's pores catch the light with a slight stiffness, and the sets have this chunky, miniature quality that makes Bikini Bottom feel like a diorama some overstimulated kindergartener threw together on the bedroom floor.

You really feel that handmade oddness once the story gets moving. SpongeBob chickens out on the theme park ride, lies to Mr. Krabs about it, and that one little lie snowballs until he and Patrick are hauled off by the Flying Dutchman himself. Mark Hamill sounds like he's having a terrific time as the ghost pirate, digging into every rough, gravelly syllable. His whole pitch about teaching the boys "intestinal fortitude" lands with exactly the right amount of theatrical menace and stupidity.



The Underworld stretch is where the film really starts to misbehave. It becomes a parade of delightful nonsense. One second SpongeBob and Patrick are drifting past glowing anemones and bioluminescent jellyfish with bugged-out eyes hanging from their tentacles. The next, two jagged deep-sea beasts launch at each other like they're about to rip one another apart, only to break into an unexpectedly passionate kiss. It's gloriously dumb and genuinely weird. *IndieWire*'s Alison Foreman hit the nail on the head when she noted that the film "looks and feels like imitation seafood, but director Derek Drymon produces a colorful, witty wasteland." The fake quality is the joke, and the movie is smart enough to lean into it.

Holding all this together is Tom Kenny, who somehow still feels underrated after voicing SpongeBob since the Clinton years. Listen to the way his voice strains when SpongeBob puffs himself up and tries to sound tougher than he is. Kenny catches that tiny, humiliating gap between childhood fear and fake bravado. He knows exactly how to make a sponge sound like a kid playing dress-up in his father's suit.



I’m not going to sell this as high art. The middle gets baggy, and at times it really does feel like an overgrown TV episode stretched past what the material can comfortably hold in 96 minutes. And yes, there are a lot of butt jokes. A truly heroic amount of butt jokes. (Though as Matt Zoller Seitz pointed out on RogerEbert.com, "Butts are funny. Everything about them.") That kind of below-the-belt slapstick is probably going to wear adults down well before the kids start fidgeting.

Still, beneath all the noise there’s a nice, gentle sweetness to the thing. By the time Mr. Krabs and an extremely unwilling Squidward are barreling toward the Underworld in a Winnebago to rescue their fry cook, the movie has settled on its real idea. Bravery has very little to do with growing up. Adulthood is mostly a scam anyway, just a height requirement you spend years trying to meet and then immediately resent. Your mileage may depend on your tolerance for a squeaky sponge in square pants, but I left the theater feeling lighter than I expected.