Avast, me hearties! A new animated adventure is about to set sail in The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants from Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon Movies. Directed by Derek Drymon, who helped creator Stephen Hillenburg bring the SpongeBob SquarePants series to television, the 3D CG outing sees the cheerful yellow hero and friends set off on an epic adventure to face The Flying Dutchman’s (voiced by Mark Hamill) swashbuckling challenges and prove the little sponge is really a “big guy.”
Going into the film’s official theatrical debut on Friday, December 19 in approximately 3,500 theaters nationwide, reviews are mostly warm and welcoming for this big screen return to Bikini Bottom. Buoyed by an all-out push for the zany humor and stylistically ping-ponging visual gags familiar to fans of the 25-plus-year-old series, Search for SquarePants has so far scored 84% on Rotten Tomatoes (from 25 critics’ reviews) and 68 points on MetaCritic (nine reviews). While some cinephiles find the film’s intensely energetic unraveling overstimulating, the majority give props for its overall SpongeBobian embrace of silliness and and joy.
Here’s what some of the critics are saying:
Best Mateys Forever: The new movie features the voices of franchise stars Tom Kenny, Clancy Brown, Rodger Bumpass, Bill Fagerbakke, Carolyn Lawrence and Mr. Lawrence, joined by Ice Spice, George Lopez, Arturo Castro, Sherry Cola, Regina Hall and Mark Hamill.
“Aside from his innate silliness, part of SpongeBob’s enduring charm has always been his irrationally trusting nature. His desire to be a big guy, rather than a ‘bubble-blowing baby boy’ as Krabs derisively describes him, makes SpongeBob an easy target for the dangerously amoral Flying Dutchman, forcing him to muster all the integrity that inevitably empowers him to triumph over his adversaries. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.”
— Justin Lowe, The Hollywood Reporter
“Mixing the more three-dimensional rendering of SpongeBob SquarePants’s world and characters, which started with 2015’s Sponge Out of Water, with a smattering of hand-drawn animation, Drymon’s film continues the series’s legacy of using varied animation styles as primers for jokes. And whether it’s the array of hilarious renderings of SpongeBob and Patrick’s butts, a recurring joke about shitting bricks, or the apocalyptic vision that our squarepantsed hero has of the giant rollercoaster he’s been itching to ride, it’s clear the filmmakers are trying to push the animation past the boundaries put up by the earlier films.”
— Derek Smith, Slant Magazine
“[The Flying Dutchman’s] underworld is a wild, colorful place (the words surreal tiki bar have been thrown around) where sirens lure you in with smooth jazz (far too tempting for Squidward, voiced again by Rodger Bumpass), where two monstrous creatures start spontaneously kissing one another instead of killing the intruders and where guardian skeletons can be brought down with laughter. Just wait until you see how SpongeBob and Patrick decide they’ve passed the ‘intestinal fortitude’ test … [The 3D animation] s a little jarring at first … Thankfully, the irreverent sense of play remains firmly intact.”
— Lindsey Bahr, Associated Press
“Search for SquarePants wisely steers the satirical conversation away from assessing the franchise’s varied legacy from over the years. Instead, [director Derek] Drymon’s stand-alone misadventure with the Flying Dutchman delivers acceptable approximations of the core SpongeBob personalities we already know and love — rendering them through soft-hearted fan service that’s comforting, nostalgic, and decidedly good enough coming from such a seasoned profit engine. The comedy isn’t as dark or as smart as the animated series’ golden age (seasons 1, 2, and 3), but it casts a wide tonal net and catches a balanced effect that’s both familiar and fresh with an appealing that could work for any one of SpongeBob’s ages.”
— Alison Foreman, IndieWire
“Director Derek Drymon, who helped develop the character of SpongeBob for TV with the late Stephen Hillenburg back in the 1990s, knows this material inside out and knows how to make it appeal to kids and grown-ups as well … Everybody involved seems to be having a blast making this latest SpongeBob a funny, fast-paced pleasure.”
— Soren Andersen, The Seattle Times
“It is ultimately the worst kind of movie for kids — one that is devoid of any respect for their intelligence or sensibilities. The adventure perpetually cycles through a cheap, rote format: innuendos (the punchline to seemingly every other joke comes down to the existence of butts); jittery slapstick; and the belief that constant eye candy is needed to keep a child’s brain tickled.”
— Brandon Yu, The New York Times
