SUMMARY
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In the underwater town of Bikini Bottom, sponges live with their pet snails inside pineapples, squids are grumpy loners with delusions of being good at playing the clarinet, plankton are evil geniuses whose grand plan for world domination is by stealing the secret formula to the Krabbie Pattie, a hamburger craved equally by stupid starfish and aquatic squirrels and kept guarded by a penny-pinching crustacean.
This is the world of SpongeBob SquarePants, a cartoon created by marine biologist and animator Stephen Hillenburg that has been running to the enjoyment of both kids and adults since 1999. It is all very loopy, with a simplistic animation style that lends a lot to the absurdist allure each of its thirty-minute episodes haphazardly fosters.
Second feature
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, the second feature length film to sprout out of the hit cartoon series, does not have ambitions of being cinematic. It looks and feels the same, only bigger. Except for the final third of the film which has SpongeBob and his gang traverse the above-world looking as sophisticated as the computer generated characters Pixar unleashes into the world, the film maintains its charming boob tube aesthetic.
The problem about cartoons transitioning to the silver screen is that they are suddenly burdened with a need to be bigger and more pertinent than their television origin. It has something to do with the fact that they now have to prove that they deserve to exist beyond free television, that they deserve to be paid to be seen.
More often than not, this mentality appropriates for the material relevance and artifice that is very off-putting, making the film versions overstuffed, mutated and reverent versions of their former selves. Nickelodeon Films’ own The Rugrats Movie (1998) and Hey Arnold!: The Movie (2002) have suffered from overreaching to the point of losing whatever that is that made the series popular enough to be given the big screen treatment.
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water proves that director Paul Tibbitt, who has been involved with the series since the beginning in various capacities as writer, executive producer, and voice actor, knows exactly what makes the cartoons click with both children and adults and decides to swear fealty to it, even if it means that the movie will have the look like just an ordinary episode, only with a very generous mix of steroids and uppers.
The good, the bad and the stupid
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water opens with a pirate, played by Antonio Banderas with such impassioned nuttiness, snatching a magical book from its ghoulish guardian.
The book turns out to be a storybook, which the pirate proceeds to read to an audience of gullible seagulls.
The pirate’s story is about Bikini Bottom, which ends up in a Mad Max-inspired post-apocalyptic mess when the formula to the Krabbie Patty suddenly disappears after persistent Plankton was able to nearly steal it for himself. As always, Plankton is framed as the bad guy, with SpongeBob, motivated by the sheer kindness of his heart and the lack of mental capabilities, instills the value of teamwork to recover the formula and restore peace to Bikini Bottom.
In a quest for a perfectly good burger that one-ups Danny Leiner’s famously silly Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), SpongeBob and his team composed of Plankton, Mr. Crabs, Squidward, Patrick, and Sandy, are forced to go to shore to discover what has become of the formula to their town’s favorite sandwich.
Taking comedy seriously
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water is everything that is to be expected from a cartoon that favors the pleasures of guiltless inanity. Reverence is simply boring. Everything that would normally deserve a bit of respect, from graceful dolphins to Ennio Morricone’s emotionally-charged music, is turned into launch pads for punchlines.
It is a film that takes nonsense very seriously, brimming with jokes, from the simplest of puns to the most subtly perverse of visual jokes.
The film oozes with sarcasm to delight the cynics who may have the same predisposition as Plankton and his disdain for anything snowy white and fluffy. At the same time, it is also defiantly cheerful, celebratory of how diverse humor can be. – Rappler.com
Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema. Profile photo by Fatcat Studios
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