Since its inception as a Nickelodeon show over a quarter century ago, SpongeBob SquarePants has racked up a loyal fanbase thanks largely to its protagonist’s winning blend of cheerful naïveté and dangerously boundless optimism. Derek Drymon’s The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants sees the character returning to the big screen for the fourth time, and first since 2020’s Sponge on the Run. If that earlier film saw the series worryingly suffering from diminishing returns, Search for SquarePants arrives just in time to right the ship, with the writers’ and animators’ visual ingenuity, slapstick surrealism, and deployment of absurdist non sequiturs once again feeling fresh and innovative.
With such beloved characters as Sandy Squirrel and Plankton consigned to cameos, SpongeBob (Tom Kenny), Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke), Gary (Tom Kenny), Mr. Krabs (Rodger Bumpass), and Squidward (Rodger Bumpass) are tasked with taking the reins. And as Search for SquarePants shifts setting from Bikini Bottom to the underworld, we’re treated to a beautifully designed, visually vibrant environment filled with outlandish and grotesque creatures. It’s down there where the ghost pirate and long-standing SpongeBob villain, the Flying Dutchman (Mark Hamill), resides, and he’s found the perfect patsy for his evil plan in SpongeBob.
Mixing the more three-dimensional rendering of SpongeBob SquarePants’s world and characters, which started with 2015’s Sponge Out of Water, with a smattering of hand-drawn animation, Drymon’s film continues the series’s legacy of using varied animation styles as primers for jokes. And whether it’s the array of hilarious renderings of SpongeBob and Patrick’s butts, a recurring joke about shitting bricks, or the apocalyptic vision that our squarepantsed hero has of the giant rollercoaster he’s been itching to ride, it’s clear the filmmakers are trying to push the animation past the boundaries put up by the earlier films.
Of course, eye candy only goes so far. Beyond the delightfully madcap, swashbuckling adventure taking full advantage of the animators’ creative dexterity, the film is dotted with the whacky humor and ingenious puns that fans of the series have some to expect. Even the catalyst of the plot is quite funny, with SpongeBob having just reached the height to be able to ride the aforementioned rollercoaster, and after chickening out, remains determined to prove to Patrick and Mr. Krabs that he’s indeed a “big guy.” That becomes a kind of refrain throughout, as in the Ice Spice bop on the soundtrack that spurs SpongeBob to get his ass-shaking dance on and the Flying Dutchman to refer to his all-too-enthusiastic victim as a “bubble-blowing baby boy.”
Unsurprisingly, the more that SpongeBob insists that he really is a big boy, the more the film finds new perilous situations to put him and Patrick in, especially as they battle their way through Challenge Cove, a mountain of video game-esque challenges that SpongeBob endures to prove his mettle. If the film’s breathless pacing and rapid-fire jokes run out of steam just a tad as SpongeBob’s stay in the underworld extends, Search for SquarePants is still charming, spirited, and ludicrous enough to prove that it’s not quite time to tell this series to walk the plank.
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