‘The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants’ Review

Since its inception as a Nickelodeon present over 1 / 4 century in the past, SpongeBob SquarePants has racked up a loyal fanbase thanks largely to its protagonist’s successful mix of cheerful naïveté and dangerously boundless optimism. Derek Drymon’s The SpongeBob Film: Search for SquarePants sees the character returning to the large display for the fourth time, and first since 2020’s Sponge on the Run. If that earlier movie noticed the sequence worryingly affected by diminishing returns, Search for SquarePants arrives simply in time to proper the ship, with the writers’ and animators’ visible ingenuity, slapstick surrealism, and deployment of absurdist non sequiturs as soon as once more feeling contemporary and revolutionary.

With such beloved characters as Sandy Squirrel and Plankton consigned to cameos, SpongeBob (Tom Kenny), Patrick (Invoice 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 Backside to the underworld, we’re handled to a fantastically designed, visually vibrant atmosphere crammed with outlandish and grotesque creatures. It’s down there the place the ghost pirate and long-standing SpongeBob villain, the Flying Dutchman (Mark Hamill), resides, and he’s discovered the right patsy for his evil plan in SpongeBob.

Mixing the extra three-dimensional rendering of SpongeBob SquarePants’s world and characters, which began with 2015’s Sponge Out of Water, with a smattering of hand-drawn animation, Drymon’s movie continues the sequence’s legacy of utilizing diversified animation types as primers for jokes. And whether or not it’s the array of hilarious renderings of SpongeBob and Patrick’s butts, a recurring joke about shitting bricks, or the apocalyptic imaginative and prescient that our squarepantsed hero has of the large rollercoaster he’s been itching to journey, it’s clear the filmmakers try to push the animation previous the boundaries put up by the sooner movies.

In fact, eye sweet solely goes up to now. Past the delightfully madcap, swashbuckling journey taking full benefit of the animators’ inventive dexterity, the movie is dotted with the whacky humor and ingenious puns that followers of the sequence have some to count on. Even the catalyst of the plot is kind of humorous, with SpongeBob having simply reached the peak to have the ability to journey the aforementioned rollercoaster, and after taking flight, stays decided to show to Patrick and Mr. Krabs that he’s certainly a “huge man.” That turns into a sort of chorus all through, as within the Ice Spice bop on the soundtrack that spurs SpongeBob to get his ass-shaking dance on and the Flying Dutchman to discuss with his all-too-enthusiastic sufferer as a “bubble-blowing child boy.”

Unsurprisingly, the extra that SpongeBob insists that he actually is an enormous boy, the extra the movie finds new perilous conditions to place him and Patrick in, particularly as they battle their method by Problem Cove, a mountain of video game-esque challenges that SpongeBob endures to show his mettle. If the movie’s breathless pacing and rapid-fire jokes run out of steam only a tad as SpongeBob’s keep within the underworld extends, Search for SquarePants continues to be charming, spirited, and ludicrous sufficient to show that it’s not fairly time to inform this sequence to stroll the plank.