For around a quarter of a century, the happy-go-lucky yellow sea sponge called Bob has been entertaining kids (and a fair number of adults) with better-than-it-needs-to-be metatextual humour and maritime hijinks set mostly in the underwater enclave of Bikini Bottom. The SpongeBob SquarePants TV show has been going for over 300 episodes, spawning video games, memes, merch, comics, a Broadway musical and, of course, movies along the way. Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie is the fourth SpongeBob film, albeit a spin-off centring on beloved squirrel scientist Sandy Cheeks (voiced here, as in the series, by Carolyn Lawrence).
As is traditional with big-screen ventures for small-screen characters, this takes the gang out of their comfort zone and into a brave new world, in this case Texas, the Lone Star State being Sandy Cheeks’s original home. The movie takes an admirably nuanced view of science: in the right hands, scientific method is a tool for enriching our collective knowledge and enabling useful activities such as propelling squirrels and sea sponges from the bottom of the sea on a rescue mission to a lab in Galveston. In the wrong hands (a live-action pug-toting evil mastermind played by an incredibly game Wanda Sykes), scientific breakthroughs are misused for naked profiteering and the working through of unresolved childhood issues on a global stage.
But as ever with SpongeBob, the message is very much secondary to the entertainingly madcap medium, which in this instalment mixes animation with raucous live action – though the live-action elements are hardly striving for realism, with sets and costumes goofy and larger than life. It’s all manically enjoyable, especially for the core demographic (my seven-year-old niece said she would give the film four stars). For general viewers, it may not pack as much of an emotional punch, but like SpongeBob himself, it’s thoroughly absorbing.