Could the students who snickered their way through those first SpongeBob adventures have foreseen the franchise persisting 25 years on, even after metabolising the most lysergic pharmaceuticals? Such longevity is partly down to extra-commercial considerations, in that the series has a capacity for tickling adults’ funny bones – possibly even those now fully grown students – as well as the very young. Though it can’t claim anything quite as unexpected as the David Hasselhoff cameo in 2004’s The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie – not so much a high bar as an unforgettably wonky one – feature four thinks nothing of making Clancy Brown talk like a pirate while handing royalty cheques to Barbra Streisand and Yello. Anything can still happen in Bikini Bottom.
Preceded by a festive short for Paramount’s other weathered babysitters, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the new SpongeBob film soon settles into a familiarly goofy groove, its script a PG-rated treatise on the pros and cons of growth. This SpongeBob (once more voiced by Tom Kenny) is now 36 clams high, a source of particular excitement as this will allow him to ride the rollercoaster of his dreams. (One early, trippy laugh: our overexcitable hero’s imagined loop-the-loops.) As in the best contemporary American animation, though, the corkscrew plotting is the real rollercoaster. SB’s quest to obtain the fabled swashbuckler certificate that will prove him a “big guy” brings him into conflict with the Flying Dutchman, voiced by the suddenly ubiquitous Mark Hamill.
The Dutchman’s ship bumps up the scale, but mostly it’s the usual bricolage of digimation and hand-turned elements, forever foregrounding pleasing, properly cartoonish effects. SpongeBob wedges himself into an AC unit and somehow emerges squarer still; there’s a cameo from a pair of chattering joke-shop false teeth; and in a punishment guaranteed to resonate with the six-year-old crowd, our hero is subjected to endless washing-up. Whether its spitballing silliness will linger when the lights come up is debatable, but it’s a solid SpongeBob movie – and by far the funniest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, encompassing a hearty Davy Jones joke and a saltily suggestive catchphrase for SpongeBob’s pal Patrick: “The best guys are big guys.” Those students will be snickering anew.
