I prefer SpongeBob, Patrick, Squidward, et al. There’s a time machine and then another spatial-temporal dimension, and then the whole gang morphs into very ugly 3-D figures and even uglier Marvel-esque superheroes in a battle to the death with the unexpected supervillain. At a certain point, I lost the narrative thread. Lawrence,” who sounds like Fred Flintstone on crystal meth), who team up despite Plankton’s inability (being so self-centered) to pronounce the word team. The only hope rests with SpongeBob (vocals - and chortles - by the great Tom Kenney) and Plankton (vocals by “Mr. I can tell you that the lack of Krabby Patties causes disturbing changes in Patrick and also, sadly, Gary the snail - it’s like Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery down there. Actually, I couldn’t spoil it if I wanted, since I’m not entirely sure what I saw and, anyway, these jokes don’t translate. Yes, Plankton did engineer a scheme involving pickle torpedoes, a giant robot, and a Trojan-horse-like coin to get into the Krusty Krab’s safe, but the recipe’s disappearance has an even more sinister - and possibly supernatural - source. I know what you’re thinking! This has to be the work of Plankton, the tiny but very loud and jealous owner of the rival Chum Bucket restaurant. What could usher in the apocalypse? What else? The loss of the secret recipe for the wildly addictive Krabby Patties from the Krusty Krab restaurant where SpongeBob works and his best friend Patrick the fat, pink, imbecilic starfish eats. After dueling with a reanimated skeleton and shushing some card-playing seagulls, the Pirate opens said mysterious tome and begins to read a tale of wholesale destruction, societal collapse, rampaging mobs, and mass starvation. It begins, as usual, with a hairy pirate, who’s there to sing the SpongeBob theme that whisks us to the undersea world of Bikini Bottom, with its ukulele music and flower-cloud backdrops … but wait: He’s played by Antonio Banderas (in the flesh!), and he’s in the middle of an Indiana Jones–like quest to steal a magic book. It’s big, loud, choppy, in-your-face, and absolutely, positively glorious. The few song fragments are punishingly discordant, and it’s visually an eyesore - a kaleidoscope of bright, mismatched colors, and in 3-D, too, to guarantee you’ll get a headache. If there’s a narrative structure, I missed it - the story line is slipshod and shambolic. (The soundtrack isn’t as rich and there are no celebrity voices.) The opening makes little sense and what follows makes less. Now, a decade later, comes The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, which looks as if it cost less. Missing were those free-associational spasms of craziness that make SpongeBob at its best so irrationally entertaining. That story structure was like an anchor weighing it down. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie had great bits and a terrific soundtrack, but it was a tad … stately.
But how would a full-length movie play? Hillenburg was convinced that the same level of intensity over 80-plus minutes would wear the audience out - that a feature needed a more conventional narrative arc and more even pacing. On TV, the SpongeBob cartoons were 11 minutes, the perfect length of time to be bombarded by free-form, surreal gags, inevitably interspersed by the high-pitched chortle of their happy-go-lucky sea-sponge hero. and talk to Stephen Hillenburg and his colleagues about turning their Nickelodeon smash SpongeBob SquarePants into a feature film. In 2004, I got a dream newspaper assignment from the New York Times: to fly to L.A. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water.
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