Since 1999, SpongeBob SquarePants has been delighting audiences around the world with the show’s signature humor and quirky animation. Eventually, Nickelodeon even awarded its golden goose with an iconic feature film, aptly titled The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. More than a decade later, the super fun, surprisingly excellent The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie: Sponge Out of Water seamlessly blended the original hand drawn animation with live action and effective CGI. While I sat out the third installment, this fourth entry promised a new viewpoint by giving scene-stealer Sandy Cheeks her own time in the spotlight. Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie has to be one of the laziest excuses for an animated family flick I have ever seen, trading the charm and quirk of typical SpongeBob for a soulless lesson in reductive, nonsensical storytelling.
Saving Bikini Bottom reunites the majority of the original vocal cast, including Carolyn Lawrence, Tom Kenny, and Clancy Brown—if only the script matched up with the pedigree of the returning actors. We first come upon Sandy Cheeks, greeting all of Bikini Bottom in her typical shrill fashion. With a robotic horse named Sparky, Sandy collects her daily dose of data while singing in a cowboy hat about how she was born and raised in Texas and loves science. The setup makes obvious allusions to Sandy’s upbringing, but more on that later. In the middle of her extravagant song, some giant crane comes down into the water, scooping up the entirety of Bikini Bottom along with it. Sandy and Spongebob manage to get away, whilst the others are left behind. At the last second, Sandy notices who owns the crane: BOOTS Marine Biology Lab, Sandy’s employer!
In order to rescue their friends from certain doom, Sandy and SpongeBob must team up to get to the biology lab before it’s too late. This entails riding a volcanic vent to the surface, hitching a ride on an airplane, flying with the help of Sandy’s “arm flaps,” and being caught in a “Texas twister,” while still ending up over six hundred miles away from their final destination. Meanwhile, the textureless human villains of the story, two mindless lab workers (Ilia Isorelys Paulino and Matty Cardarople) and their purple-haired boss, Sue Nahmee (Wanda Sykes), with an evil pet pug named ‘Cuda, begin to enact their grand scheme. Project Sea Pals threatens to genetically modify the denizens of Bikini Bottom, mass produce them, and use them as an ultimate “pet” product for kids. It will take the entire Cheeks family to face off against Sue Nahmee before she goes global with her toxic ideas. The bumbling baddies are void of personality, except for Sue Nahmee. Sykes certainly does her best, but the reveals featuring her character are preposterous, to put it mildly. Her performance easily steals the movie from any of her animated costars.
The nonsensical physical humor extends down every aspect of the production, failing to illicit so much as a giggle. The novelty of seeing Sandy lead her own feature quickly wears thin, as not even the promise of the entire extended Cheeks family can sustain such lazy writing. The comedy is so inconsistent that they cannot even maintain a joke through their own warped logic. In one scene, SpongeBob gets grossed out at the scent of being “downwind” from a tornado, yet earlier sniffed literal animal shit and was happy to do so. One chase scene with ‘Cuda pursuing the crew through a waterpark finds a plot point where ‘Cuda climbs up stairs, yet in the next shot emerges soaking wet from a waterpark slide. The creatives clearly could not have possibly cared any less if they tried. The legacy characters like Squidward, Mr. Krabs, and Patrick are basically an afterthought. Blending the CGI animation with the live action produces minimal actual engaging interactions, begging the question as to why they bothered in the first place.
How does something as poorly made as this get released when Coyote vs. Acme still sits on a virtual shelf somewhere? SpongeBob used to feel edgy and exciting, especially in its earlier seasons. The previous theatrical animated films returned to the feel and general tone we knew and loved. At the very least, they provided an outlet for people of all ages to laugh at the silly situations and exaggerated humor. This is not way to celebrate the 25th anniversary of SpongeBob. By setting this entry almost entirely on land and losing the magic of the traditional animation, they were already fighting an uphill battle. I cannot imagine anyone over the age of seven finding much enjoyment here, which is a real shame because a solo Sandy Cheeks venture could have been truly special. Instead, the creatives assume we will be content eating from the Chum Bucket after we have already dined contentedly at the Krusty Krab.
Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie emerges from a pineapple under the sea and onto Netflix, swimming ashore globally on Friday, August 2nd.
