But even so, it's pretty damn good, all in all.
The film comes on the back of an early contender for Most Misleading Ad Campaign of 2015: it is not at all a Smurfs-esque adventure in which animated characters are turned into fully-rendered CGI figures wandering around in the live-action world. This aspect of the film is held until rather close to the end, making up - tops - 20% of the total running time. Instead, is a far more precious and rare kind of thing: it is a theatrically-released 2-D animated movie produced by the American film industry. Though really, as exciting as that is, it's still selling things short: Sponge out of Water is a mixed-media project combining at least three entirely different types of 2-D animation alongside its scenes of 3-D cartoons interacting with flesh and blood people in scenes shot by the live-action unit to be eye-searingly bright, with glowing, oversaturated colors that help the very stylised designs of the animated characters fit in better.
Visually, then, it's a film of rare ambition in family filmmaking, the obvious result of passion and care. It's a film made by people whose first priority was to realise their idiosyncratic ideas without compromise, and only second to continue feeding the maw of a franchise that was born almost sixteen years ago with the SpongeBob SquarePants TV series. Which is, I have to admit, really heartwarming.
So do is it with the writing, which veers madly from purest inspiration to deeply lamentable crap jokes and back again without pause, but never deviates from one peculiar mission: to provide, in a format that very little children can enjoy, a level of genre-blending non sequitur-based storytelling that borders on open surrealism at times. Whatever else we can say about it, Sponge out of Water is a profoundly weird movie: it opens with a flawlessly stereotypical pirate, Burger Beard (Antonio Banderas, holding nothing back) plowing through the Caribbean with a flotilla of adorable talking seagulls for his ...crew? Pets? It doesn't matter, anyway. Quite without explanation, he's doing this in what appears to be the modern world, where he plans to turn his pirate ship into a food truck. That kind of unapologetic "this makes no sense whatsoever, and you're just going to have to live with it" mentality is typical of children's television and avant-garde experimental narrativity alike, and if I didn't already know, I'd be hard-pressed to say which of those two trends Sponge out of Water would rather fit into.
The main plot of the film, taking place in the wholly 2-D underwater community of Bikini Bottom, finds the secret recipe for the cultishly adored Krabby Patties going missing, thrusting the town into a hellish post-apocalyptic nightmare world, from which it can only be saved by the combined efforts of boundlessly upbeat - even manic - SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) and the obnoxious, scheming, selfish Plankton (Mr. Lawrence), who build a time machine in order to prevent the recipe from ever being lost. And things get more complicated from there. The hop-scotching plot development - which I presume to be an inheritance from the series and its short episodic format - does two wonderful things for the film: one is that it prevents it from ever slowing down and becoming predictable, the other is that it acquires the babbling stream-of-consciousness of energised kids at play. The film is absolutely deranged, in the best possible way, and the fluid mix of visual styles matches perfectly with its anything-goes writing.
Eventually, this does all become wearying - the movie never shakes the sense that its natural home is on television, where one can drift away from it for a few minutes here and there, or at least divert one's attention. It's certainly not like any of the visuals are clearly suited to a big-screen presentation. As it is, there comes a point where things invisibly turn into an endurance test to see how long we can withstand the non-stop assault of humor, which comes in the form of absurd wordplay, scatology, parodies of things the target audience can hardly have been supposed to have heard of, and just plain randomness. Despite the obviously sweet-natured optimism driving all of this, with its genuine affection for its characters and desire for all them to end up happy, the film doesn't rest for a moment, turning even its handful of "can't we ventriloquise the theme for a scene?" layovers serving mostly as an opportunity to introduce new sorts of jokes, new visual styles.
For me, I started lagging behind right about when the characters popped out into live-action; I imagine other viewers will run out of steam earlier or later, maybe all the way at the end. But it's a lot of stimulation packed into 92 minutes, more than I can pretend to have been ready for. The film is delightful, and inventive, and wonderfully enjoyable to look at; but the film is also busy, and the lack of even a single built-in breathing break made it hard for this particular grown-up to get the full effect of all the kid-focused zaniness.
7/10
If you like this one, I sincerely suggest you check out the original "Spongebob" movie, which contains a LOT of the same elements you cite here, with the advantage of coming along at a time in the franchise's life where it wasn't quite so tired out as it is today.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who long since lost interest in the show itself(it was once a real favorite of mine, but somewhere around Season 4 it went through a noticeable change in tone and style that killed a lot of the appeal for me), it does my heart good to hear the ad campaign's emphasis on the CG animation is ultimately a trick, and that the movie itself may actually be worth checking into. If indeed it taps into the same anarchic spirit that animated the first "Spongebob" movie, I'd say this one may finally have made it on to my To Do list.
Also, sorry I've been absent from these parts s'much lately; Life 'n' all that. But, once the proper checks clear, I DO intend to donate to your fundraiser...just need to figure out WHICH of the many movies I'd love to see your take on I'm going to pick. ;3
I'm so glad to hear this is good, especially from a franchise newbie. The early 2000's is widely regarded as a golden age for television, but what's often missed is that it was also the golden age for animated television, lead by Bruce Timm's DC Animated Universe (which was on the ground-breaking Justice League at the time) and - believe it or not - Spongebob Squarepants.
ReplyDeleteThe early seasons of Spongebob were incredible, every bit as inventive, influential, well-written, humor-packed and emotionally sweet as the prime years of The Simpsons.
And yes, Tim, those weird references have always been a series hallmark. One of the most famous episodes builds a plot around a final punchline that features a real-life, onscreen appearance of Nosferatu!!!
I haven't seen the new movie yet (and wasn't going to, based on the trailers, until I heard the wonderful news about the animation), but I would say it's closer to the top of the pile, Spongebob-wise, than the bottom. It shares with the first three seasons and the first movie the creative involvement of Stephen Hillenburg, who departed after then for fear that the show would get stale and unappealing. He was completely right.
ReplyDeleteI want to echo the other commenters in saying that the early years of the show are well worth checking out, because they are marvelous and very much fall into that same trend of straddling the line between children's entertainment and surrealism. The first movie, as well as the episodes Frankendoodle and Band Geeks (among others) have a lot of merit for animation buffs.
My favorite SpongeBob gag (and there are many, oh so many great SpongeBob gags) was in a skiing sequence where, as the group skis down a mountain (located under the sea like everything else) one of the trees in the background is inconspicuously wearing a mask and snorkel.
ReplyDeleteI actually re-watched the 2004 movie rather recently, and was disappointed to discover that it was a bit crap. While a lot of the gags had the proper enthusiasm to them, the whole thing was overly focused on narrative and it lacked the wit that the best of the episodes did. Episodes like Band Geeks, Rock Bottom, or Graveyard Shift had something much smarter than the apparent "why the hell not" lurking beneath and driving the absurdism.
ReplyDeleteThe early aughts do put in a strong claim to being the golden age of animated television - what with Gendy Tarkovsky's work and a generally strong Nicktoons lineup. However, while the current period isn't necessarily an immediately obvious step up, the field is becoming astonishingly arable. Cartoon Network and now possibly even Disney have been clearly signing on to the idea of "prestige television animation," which makes itself most readily apparent with CN's Over the Garden Wall miniseries from last autumn which is something that likely could never have happened until now. (The only problem is Nickelodeon's enthusiastic refusal to develop so much as even a sense of brand identity, let alone a creator driven atmosphere, which has resulted in the idea of working there being seen as nearly a worst case scenario for skilled animation students.)
I'm a big fan of classic Spongebob, so I glad to hear this wasn't crap, especially since the show has been in something of an awful lull for the past decade and change, and the ads made it look like The Smurfs. If this film intrigued you at all, I'd recommend checking out the first four seasons of the show, as well as the original film, they're a lot of fun. And since everyone's mentioning classic episodes, I'll point out "Pizza Delivery," which cracks me up everytime I see it!
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