Review of The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (2015) by Drauchdoes2015 — 13 Apr 2015

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water is the first film in the long running franchise since 2004’s The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and represents a brief resurgence of relevancy for a series whose cultural significance has dwindled to a Kindergardener’s introduction to memes.

Upon returning to Bikini Bottom, we find that the universe of SpongeBob has remained absurd and nonsensical, though it hasn’t aged quite as well fans would hope. The tone remains off-kilter, but only amateurishly so. It’s actually quite tame and ordinary, even by SpongeBob’s childish standards. There was a time when the series gave into some legitimately weird impulses, psychedelic even. Save for a sequence where SpongeBob and Plankton travel through time, meet a 3-D space dolphin and inadvertently destroy part of the solar system (a legitimate peak in oddity for the series) the gags here are by turns predictable, repetitive, juvenile, or just plain grating.

I’m not saying that I’ve never found SpongeBob entertaining, I actually consider myself a fan. But the comedy attempted here lacks bite or inspiration. From the Loony Toons slapstick to the horrendous subplot featuring Antonio Banderas as a scruffy pirate (that contains legitimate poop jokes that I just cannot abide), SpongeBob seems off his game to someone who stopped avidly watching the show after it’s heyday something like a decade ago.

And the character's archetype’s have, at this point, lost their zany dimensionality. Patrick is still an idiot, Squidward is still a drag, and SpongeBob is still as effervescent as he is annoying, but most of the inspired humor seems to have already been mined from their antics, leaving a feeling that our heroes’ actions are being filtered through an auto-pilot system, or worse, that they have nothing left to do. I’ll admit that some instances break this feeling of stagnancy, yet nothing presented here reaches the incredibles highs of The Camping Episode or Chocolate with Nuts. We’ve seen all of this before, and better.

One feat I can cite as a positive is that the animation seems to have improved markedly. Even the CGI/live-action crossover sequence at the end was visually impressive, though it wasn’t a necessarily unprecedented move, as prominent instances of the hybrid such as The Smurfs or Yogi Bear have left a scar on the entire approach altogether. On occasion, the art style ventures outside the proverbial spectrum to allow glimpses of surrealism, a welcome strangeness as we trudge through a muck of otherwise pedestrian visual cues. There is also an unavoidable nostalgic appeal I cannot deny, having watched the show a great deal when I was young. Seeing everyone back on the silver screen is a most welcome reunion to my inner child, albeit a disappointing one.

The story is run-of-the-mill; SpongeBob must once again save Bikini Bottom by retrieving the Krabby Patty secret formula. Things go pretty much as planned and everything resolves so that the series can remain cyclical and timeless, like many a children’s animated program. The character arc of series villain Plankton is rendered completely pointless, and it wouldn’t be so irritating had the central thematic focus of the film not revolved around the trope of friendship. The movie beats this cliched moral lesson over your head for an hour in an attempt at emotional resonance, yet when at the end of the film Plankton once again renounces his good ways to simply turn everything back to normal, you come to realize that however entertaining the show once was, this ending furthers the evidence that the series has completely succumbed to self-franchise-regulation, and will not now, if ever, show any progression.

Most of this shouldn’t be so detrimental to a series that openly markets itself as episodic, yet when an adult audience takes notice of fleet hints of genuine comedic potential, it seems like such a waste when artistic parameters are needlessly taken to ensure that SpongeBob will never change so as to never lose his appeal. On the contrary, I feel the opposite will become of these programs, at least in the eyes of conscious consumers of media. Shows like this will slowly fade in relevance to anyone over the age of 7 if they continue to show a lack of resolve or innovation. I believe this series still has the ingredients to churn out charmingly diverting entertainment in spite of being a cartoon marketed at tykes, we may just need a less derivative approach to get us there.