Celebrating the bizarre genius of the SpongeBob SquarePants movies

One of my favourite trips to the cinema in the last decade was in 2015 when I went with a few friends to see The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water. For 90 minutes, that audience was gifted with a machine gun rhythm of absurd comedy, time travel, and a bit where Matt Berry voiced a battle-rapping space dolphin.

Fans of the SpongeBob SquarePants TV show have been given a lot to enjoy over the last few decades, on both the big and small screens. We're now firmly in spin-off country, with new movie Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie soaring up the Netflix charts and giving the water-dwelling squirrel character centre stage for the first time.

On the face of it, this sounds like standard kiddie franchise slop. If something's successful, you make lots of it on both the big and small screen. Simple. But the SpongeBob universe is something special, something different — a completely mad world packed with wit, invention, and so much silliness.

The first genius move at play here is that none of the currently released SpongeBob movies is a sequel to any of the others. They're all entirely standalone and therefore completely accessible. In an era of family movies in which it often seems you need to do decades of homework to fully understand them, SpongeBob — much like The Simpsons — excels because it never places that sort of demand upon its audience. These movies simply ask that you turn up and have a great time.

This is particularly crucial for a movie franchise based on a kid-focused cartoon. The first SpongeBob movie came out in 2004 before a decade-long wait until Sponge Out of Water arrived in 2015. It's fair to say that the core audience of those two movies will not have been the same children. The target market for the sequel wasn't even born when the first film came out.

Read more: SpongeBob SquarePants is ‘autistic’, voice actor says (The Independent)

SpongeBob on the big screen, therefore, traffics less in plot and continuity than it does in sheer absurdity. Its movies are essentially extended, extra-ambitious episodes of the TV show, which gives them the freedom to try things. In Sponge Out of Water, they enter the live-action world — an idea also used in The Sandy Cheeks Movie to divisive effect — for an offbeat superhero spoof. It doesn't completely work, but that doesn't matter because there's another joke on the way soon after.

That's the price you pay for innovation. Occasionally, something might miss the mark slightly. But while so many family-friendly franchises play things infuriatingly safe to rake in the box office dollars, SpongeBob is willing to innovate. The 2020 SpongeBob movie, Sponge On the Run, brilliantly introduced Keanu Reeves as a tumbleweed spirit called Sage — his live-action face on an animated tumbleweed. It could've been terrible, but they were willing to try something silly and they reaped the rewards.

Read more: The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run Review: The First All-CGI SpongeBob Adventure Has His Skewed Spirit of Fun (Variety)

Sponge Out of Water is very much the zenith of this. The story uses a time travel narrative to move through different animation styles and deliver skits as unusual as Bubbles the Dolphin. He's an ancient being who watches Saturn and Jupiter to make sure they don't smash into each other — obviously.

Bubbles' brief scene is absurdly memorable, but things got even better when he turned up at the end for a post-credits battle rap with an animated seagull. In the UK version of the movie, that seagull was voiced by Alan Carr. It was perfect. You don't get that in a Pixar sequel.

Watch: Matt Berry as Bubbles in The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water

This is at the core of what makes the SpongeBob movies so special. Even when they miss the mark, you can't deny their ambition. They might not have the consistency of something like Despicable Me or Toy Story, but there's something worth treasuring about the oddball weirdness of them all.

The Hollywood of the 2020s is a risk-averse and franchise-focused world. SpongeBob is undeniably the latter of those things — there's a new SpongeBob movie with Mark Hamill on the way in 2025, as well as a Plankton film at Netflix — but it's the exact opposite of the former.

Read more: Why Are They Ruining SpongeBob Squarepants?! (Daily Beast)

There's plenty to come from the SpongeBob movie universe and, joyously, none of us has any idea what to expect. We could get Matt Berry as a laser-wielding space dolphin, Keanu Reeves' face on a tumbleweed, or a 90-minute adventure about a squirrel in a diving suit. One thing's for sure, though, it will be made with love and a true admiration for an underrated element of us all: weirdness.

Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie is on Netflix in the UK now.