It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants” is the film that lastly squeegees the life out of SpongeBob SquarePants. However watching this pleasant but slightly toothless journey, with its jokes that merely don’t pop the best way they used to, you may really feel SpongeBob sliding into the zone of a harebrained but rote elder statesman of high-energy juvenilia. He’s nonetheless a beguiling doofus who, as voiced by Tom Kenny, appears like Daffy Duck on laughing fuel, and there’s nonetheless an interesting aura of arrested kitsch to the now shiny and digital “SpongeBob” world. (For causes I can’t fairly analyze, it was higher when it was drawn.) However the authentic “SpongeBob” collection, and several other of the earlier big-screen variations (together with the final one, “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run”), struck a lot funnier notes of flippant irresponsibility.
Again in 2011, when the unique Nickelodeon TV collection “SpongeBob SquarePants” bought referred to as on the carpet by a research in Pediatrics journal, which discovered that the present was damaging the eye span of 4-year-olds, it wasn’t simply the cartoon’s lickety-split rhythms that raised eyebrows; so did its angle of amoral imbecility. “SpongeBob SquarePants” had been round since 1999, and when the present began it was revolutionary: an under-the-sea slice of surrealist anarchy. SpongeBob himself was a wide-eyed dopey mascot of enjoyable, however there was an aggression to the world he moved by way of, and that spirit started to take over the universe of kiddie cartoons. (A present just like the Disney Channel’s rollicking “Large Metropolis Greens” is unthinkable with out “SpongeBob.”) In a way, all of this may be traced again to the meta cut-out fruitcake smartitude of “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” and “SpongeBob” honored that legacy by showcasing its characters with whole affection at the same time as they got here off as borderline nuts.
In “Seek for SquarePants,” our cheerfully oblivious hero has crossed a threshold: He’s now 36 clams tall. Which signifies that he’s tall sufficient to trip the rollercoaster at Captain Booty Beard’s Enjoyable Park. However as a substitute of reveling on this alternative as he will get in line for the coaster, SpongeBob freaks out, his underlying dread cued to the viewers by the “O Fortuna” fanfare from Carmina Burana. That’s a promising joke, and the entire film will now be organized round SpongeBob’s need to beat his worry and turn into a huge man.
Sadly, the chance he’s handed to do that hinges on the Flying Dutchman, a cursed pirate voiced by Mark Hamill with a mustache-twirling, ahoy-matey bravura so generic that he by no means fairly sparks to life as a personality. “Seek for Squarepants” is a swashbuckler, which looks like a normal and slightly fuddy-duddy style for a “SpongeBob” film. The Flying Dutchman, a recurring presence on the collection since Season One, is a phosphorescent inexperienced ghost who has struck a cope with the satan. The one manner he can free himself from being a mangy pirate is by tricking an “harmless” into climbing to the highest of an underwater mountain. And SpongeBob, together with his big-guy desires, is gullible sufficient to do it, even because the redoubtable Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown), together with Squidward (Rodger Bumpass), constitution a boatmobile Winnebago and go on a mission to save lots of him.
It is a film wherein Davy Jones’s Locker is situated in a males’s locker room. Through which SpongeBob and Gary the Snail have a dialog about string cheese, and the Flying Dutchman goes loopy on the sheer inanity of it. Through which the characters get caught in a “What would I do? What would you do?” conversational loop that’s pure kiddie Abbott and Costello. That final gag is fairly humorous, however an excessive amount of of “Seek for SquarePants” lacks the beautiful dementia of the early years of the collection, when the present’s creator, Stephen Hillenburg (who died in 2018), was working the happenings in Bikini Backside. Don Drymon, the director of “Seek for SquarePants,” was one of many present’s founding inventive abilities, and he definitely is aware of tips on how to preserve the butt jokes popping, however I’m sorry, they aren’t stunning butt jokes. “Seek for SquarePants,” whereas it has amusing moments, is generally SpongeBob treading water.
