THE SPONGEBOB MOVIE: SPONGE OUT OF WATER
The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge out of Water
SpongeBob SquarePants is a butter-yellow kitchen sponge with buck teeth and big, guileless eyes. The cartoon show that bears his name, which has aired on Nickelodeon since 1999, is a sprightly, winsome children’s comedy of the sort rarely seen on television anymore — indeed, its amiable naivety now seems hopelessly, if pleasingly, old-fashioned. SpongeBob is hapless optimist, like Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp; pratfalls are the blundering fellow’s métier, but he means well. And he’s sluiced his way into the popular imagination. The SpongeBob SquarePants show airs in 170 countries and in 25 languages, and last year, as it celebrated its 15th anniversary, the franchise surpassed $13-billion in global sales. Its success has to do with a certain innocence. Ours is a thoroughly ironized culture, hip and aware even at the level of Saturday morning cartoons. But SpongeBob offers a counterpoint: an earnest programme, defiantly uncool.
It was not so long ago that David Denby, writing about Shrek the Third in The New Yorker, lamented the “wised-up style” of the film’s meta-humour — emblematic, he felt, of a cultural moment in which children are “entertained with derision before they’ve been ravished by awe.” In a bid to seem hip to the adults on escort duty, children’s movies have receded into the sort of sneering, winking irony of a Family Guy bit.
The children at last Saturday morning’s preview screening of The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water were mostly young — young enough, certainly, that the series began before they were born, and in many cases young enough that the last SpongeBob movie (2004) predates them. They responded to SpongeBob with a degree of familiarity I would have thought reserved for Mickey Mouse. Sponge Out of Water begins with what I gathered was an unnecessary introduction to Bikini Bottom, SpongeBob’s undersea home, and to the various celephods and crustaceans who populate his fanciful world. Some routine exploits follow, which, if perhaps somewhat ill-suited to the scale of the big screen, are nonetheless agreeably droll: a plankton-operated tank launches an assault on the local burger joint with weaponized pickles, a scheme to steal a recipe is gamely thwarted, a bad pun drives SpongeBob into a seizure-like fit of hysterics. All of this is pleasantly endearing, in the usual SpongeBob fashion. I defer to the infant seated behind me, and the un-improvable response she barked after a particularly rousing flourish of slapstick: “That funny.”
But then SpongeBob did the unthinkable: he succumbed to the Shrek syndrome. A little over halfway into the movie, Sponge Out of Water whisks our heroes from the brine and onto the dry land of an American beach, where they gleefully cavort among oversized humans in a chunky, homely CGI. Things become rather complicated at this point, as SpongeBob and company confront a pirate (Antonio Banderas) and the coastal food truck operation that has appropriated the recipe for a prized Bikini Bottom burger. This meta-narrative conceit — which finds SpongeBob literally rewriting his own story with a book and pen — swiftly and inexplicably transforms our wide-eyed crew into a troupe of brawny 3D superheroes, replete with extravagant costumes and a clutch of special powers.
Why a movie about an unassuming cartoon sponge felt compelled to adopt the register of a summer blockbuster is beyond me. Is it simply a consequence of Marvel’s lucrative ubiquity? It seems everything now, from SpongeBob to Disney’s recent Big Hero 6, has to model itself on The Avengers, and as a result children hoping for 90 minutes in the company of a happily modest sponge will instead be bludgeoned by the pointless spectacle of Sponge Out of Water’s 20-minute climactic battle royale. The fighting, of course, has a winking, referential quality, as rib-nudging in its own dismal way as the meta-humour of Shrek. Popular culture is besieged by a predictable, festering inanity, and SpongeBob used to offer a reprieve. Now even that cartoon succour has been pulverized by the eye-rolls of a knowing irony — a once-sincere franchise brought violently up to date and made perilously, ruinously cool. Σ