The best way I can describe “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water” is as a breath of fresh air. It was not necessarily a very good movie, or even a good movie, but something… different, in a few ways. Based on the ever popular animated television show, “Sponge Out of Water” is the second attempt to bring SpongeBob to the big screen, the first attempt being 11 years ago with “The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie”. Since the release of that movie, SpongeBob has been met with mixed reception, to say the very least, from its fans. The show was criticized heavily from its 4th season (which aired after the first movie) forward. The clever writing and fast comedy that fans regaled the first three seasons of the show departed, and hence were replaced by a lot of bland, repetitive humor, stale plots, and a major decline in character writing. The show still had a gem or two, but for the most part, it aired only due to its popularity with younger audiences, to whom the series had cemented itself as a flagship series. Old fans had high hopes when it was announced that Stephen Hillenburg, the original creator of the show who’d left after the release of the first movie, would be returning to help create this one.
The film itself tells the story of the Krabby Patty formula inexplicably going missing, and SpongeBob and Plankton’s (and later, the rest of the main cast’s) journey to recover it. It’s hard to go into much more detail both because of spoilers and the absolutely insane directions that the plot moves. This movie has severe ADHD, that’s the only way to describe it accurately. The plot jumps, no, rather it leaps, from idea to idea and genre to genre. At one point it’s your classic SpongeBob episode, at another it’s some kind of a pirate movie, and then it’s a post apocalyptic movie, and a buddy comedy between the hero and villain, and then a time travel movie and a superhero movie. It covers all the ground it can in 90 minutes. As is a recurring theme in the film, the random nature of the plot is a massively mixed bag. The movie never falls into the monotony that the first did, but it also fails to be any sort of cohesive story. The first movie felt like a cohesive story; it was a hero’s journey; characters went from point A to point B, antics ensue, and the characters learn a bit about growing up. It was a versatile plot that worked for almost any sort of show, even one as odd as SpongeBob. On the other hand, this movie feels like 6 or 7 SpongeBob episodes haphazardly forced together, with nothing but a weird and hard to follow plot about some pirate and a magic book linking it altogether. The nature of the plot does help it cover more ground; the movie is able to tell a lot of really interesting and outlandish (though not always funny) jokes thanks to it. It feels more varied than the first movie, at the very least, if not more, padded with filler.
While I could talk more about the plot, and I certainly can’t excuse it for being such a mess, this is a SpongeBob movie, and the focus of SpongeBob, good or bad, new or old, has always been on its humor and its characters over story. The jokes were… okay. The over the top random nature of the plot holds over to the humor, the movie throws puns, gags, slapstick, and references at the screen unrelentingly. Rarely a minute passes without some kind of joke, usually more. The trade off here is this — there are a lot of jokes, but they’re not always funny. The really clever puns don’t have any time to sink in, they hang there for a second before we move on to the next line of dialogue, story beat, or joke. The best joke in the film is easily one made early on about SpongeBob’s laugh, and it has a loooonnnnggg time to be told, and a long time to sink in. It has build up and pay off, and doesn’t over stay its welcome. Sadly most of the other jokes in the movie are too fast for their own good and suffer for it. Granted, this means the really bad jokes, which there are a handful of, go away quickly so you can forget about them. The only joke that really got on my nerves was one made towards the end in a credits sequence, where it’s joked that the movie was overly padded and long. And it’s not funny, because the movie was overly long, and apparently the movie knew that and chose to joke about rather than fixing it. Which wasn’t funny, it was frustrating. The padded and bad portions of this movie come at the beginning and end. The opening scene is overly long and kind of boring. It was a weak introduction that made me want to sleep, or leave. The other bad part would be… the third act.
In its trailers and posters this movie showed off its live action-CGI segments, even being titled after them, and it’s kind of annoying. On the one hand, they are by far the worst part of the film, on the other hand, they take up less than 1/3 of it, so it’s misleading advertisement (not that I’m complaining). These parts of the movie fall into two main traps, first of all, it completely abandons any type of humor that good SpongeBob excels at. These scenes are filled with gimmicky slapstick and not much else. They don’t do anything clever having these characters in a real world setting, they just do the usual characters getting slapped around, and it’s not funny. The biggest victim to padding is the action scene at the end. It goes on for a while with very little of substance happing, the gags are few and far between, and there isn’t even that much physical comedy. I could excuse that if the scene was inventive or exciting, but it’s not; it’s just long winded and dull. The live action pirate does mesh well with the 2D cast, but that’s the biggest compliment I could give this part of the film. Other than that it’s really, really bad.
There’s not all that much to say about the characters, thankfully they feel like they’re 1st – 3rd season counterparts, and it’s fun to see SpongeBob and Plankton interact. It’s all just really nice, and a flaw that this film actually improves from the original movie is getting the whole side cast involved, not just SpongeBob and Patrick. Speaking of him, Patrick is the weakest link in this film. He’s not awful, but he just feels like a jerk way too often, he’s far from his original character most of the time, though they did nail a few great dumb jokes using him. SpongeBob steals the show for me, though. He’s not an annoying idiot; he’s naive and charming a lot like he used to be, and watching him try to break through Plankton’s shell and work with him is fantastic.
The animation is great. I love seeing 2D animation on the big screen, which is something I wish was easier to find now-a-days. The CGI segments look wonderful as well, the character models remind me a lot of the ones used in the recent live action Smurfs movies, they look cartoony, but they mesh nicely with their environment. I just wish that they actually used the animation for something more creative, but either way, it looks really nice. It’s worth mentioning that the movie does stop to mix things up once in a while with some unbelievably trippy bouts of animation, alla “The Fly of Despair”. It’s a little too intense at times, but still pretty cool, they’re clearly putting that movie budget to work.
For any complaining I may do, there are things to like about this movie. It clearly respects its roots, with tons of references to the original episodes — Bubble Bass the food critic shows up in the background, Patrick has a giant jar of mayo, tartar sauce is back, Patrick yells “Finland!” at one point, they use the “My Leg” gag, Flats the Flounder shows up in the credits, and those are just a few of the things I caught. When a joke does hit home, it really hits home. There are plenty of good jokes here that feel like something out of old SpongeBob. The plot is, at the very least, refreshingly different. And it’s all really nice to look at. Should you see it? Well it’s not so clear cut.
If you don’t like SpongeBob, don’t waste your time, the good humor is very SpongeBob and if you don’t like that than don’t subject yourself to it. If you’re indifferent, then probably don’t bother unless you’re going with kids, you may still like some of the humor but so much of it skews either to fans of the show or to little kids that you won’t get enough to justify the ticket. What if you do like SpongeBob? Why are you even asking? Of course you should see it, even if you don’t love it, I guarantee that you’ll find something to appreciate.