I’m not going to even attempt to discern why Netflix stakes claim to SpongeBob SquarePants spinoff movies like this new one, Plankton: The Movie, or last year’s Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie, when the megaconglomerate that owns the IP operates Paramount+, where all the TV episodes and other SBSP film live – it almost certainly has to do with some real boring stuff involving lawyers and contracts. Not that young or extremely stoned people care one way or the other; they’re surely just stoked to dive face-first into an epic adventure focused on SpongeBob’s arch-enemy Plankton, the cyclopean, anthropomorphic sea speck who believes world conquest can be attained by getting his hands on the secret recipe to the Krusty Krab’s signature Krabby Patties. But this entire movie hinges on the friction between Plankton and his robot wife Karen, which is just as ridiculous as it sounds. In other words, it’s no surprise that this is a bunch of amusingly raucous silliness.
The Gist: We open with SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) singing a little ditty that Plankton (Mr. Lawrence) interrupts because this is his movie – but don’t worry, SpongeBob plays a prominent role, because this IP knows exactly where its bread is buttered. Confession: I’m not particularly fluent in the last, oh, 23 or so years of SpongeBob SquarePants, so it’s new to me that Plankton is married to an AI ladyputer named Karen (Jill Talley), but I was however secretly hoping that SpongeBob will rip his pants again in this movie, because few things are funnier than when SpongeBob rips his pants, and you don’t have to be seven to believe that. (No spoilers on the presence of pants-ripping in this movie, of course.)
Anyway. It comes to light that Plankton and Karen’s marriage is enduring a rough patch. There’s a to-do involving Karen’s transformation of the Chum Bucket into a trendy “fusion” restaurant, and it gets so bad, she rips out the empathy chip he installed on her circuit board and goes Full Metal Evil. She uses its aurora borealis-looking magnetic tentacles to snatch every building in Bikini Bottom and cobble together a behemoth body so she can trek to the surface and get to taking over Earth. All this rigamarole has Plankton upset – he just wants to save his partnership, because he always dreamed of subjugating the entire planet alongside his beloved wife.
Some times goes by without us seeing SpongeBob, so the plot decides to lean into the more chaotic-neutral side of his personality and have him help his longtime frenemy repair his marriage. So SpongeBob dons a Freud costume and gets down to some hard, pipe-hittin’ talk therapy, prompting a flashback to Plankton’s college days, when he built Karen 1.0 out of a potato sitting in water, some electrodes and a calculator. Any deeper analysis must be done on your own time, thank you, and preferably in a more appropriate venue, thus allowing for examination of the psychosexual ramifications of building your wife out of a potato sitting in water, some electrodes and a calculator. That just seems like a really bad idea to me, building your wife out of a potato sitting in water, some electrodes and a calculator, but then again, I’m not a wannabe supervillain. Oh, and by the way, Plankton: The Movie is a musical. Everyone’s been breaking out into song this whole time!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Well, Plankton features stickier songs than Emilia Perez. And it might be the best SBSP movie yet, although it could use a scene-stealing Keanu cameo like Sponge on the Run.
Performance Worth Watching Hearing: My mind is permanently etched with an image from a SpongeBob making-of clip in which Tom Kenny makes the title character laugh by rapid-fire mini-karate-chopping his own Adam’s apple – which makes him eligible for GOAT status among all-timer cartoon voice actors Mel Blanc and Billy West, in my book.
Memorable Dialogue: Plankton finds the Karen’s OG spud in his old dorm room: “Looks like the potato’s gone rotten – like our relationship.”
Sex and Skin: Well. This movie features a cyclops plankton married to a robot made out of a potato, etc., and we therefore should absolutely under no circumstance not go there. We do get to see Plankton’s buttcheeks, though.
Our Take: I’ll let movie critics who are also idiots puzzle over whether Plankton is a character worthy of his own slightly sub-90-minute movie, because the question is moot. Everything in the SpongeBob universe exists for no reason beyond being absurd nonsense for nonsense’s sake, in the classical Lewis Carroll jabberwocky vein. Whether you deem the endlessly blabbering SpongeBob and his dopey pals funny is subjective of course, and like any slab of media targeting children and the adult children-at-heart supervising them, the jokes can be hit-or-miss. But whether you laugh six times or 36 times during Plankton: The Movie, one thing is true: Crafting a musical around this comic-villain character and lending him depth by centering the plot on his troubled marriage to an automaton requires a level of creative derangement that is objectively admirable, and any argument against such an assertion is as indefensible as fascism.
It behooves me to reveal that the movie, perhaps in an attempt to keep its brand of higgledy-piggledy hodgepodgery from leaping wholly into anarchical chaos, is rather light with the presence of SpongeBob’s eternal compadres, the idiot starfish Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) and negative-nancy Squidward (Rodger Bumpass), whose clarinet-playing might’ve inspired a delightfully maniacal musical bit. Alas, we’re left with Plankton plunking down at the piano for “I’m a Jerk,” which is one heck of a cockle-tickling, show-stopping power ballad, funny if you’re not familiar with the wearisome tropes of movie musicals, and even funnier if you are.
Otherwise, Plankton: The Movie illustrates very little need for thematic analysis or in-depth character study. It’s crammed with jokes ranging from stupid-for-their-own-sake to self-aware, including a bit where SpongeBob discovers coffee (he’s already a bit extra without being caffeinated, you know), a referential nod to WALL-E and moments where Plankton “directs” his own movie via voiceover. Visually, director Dave Needham exploits the general anything-goes vibe of SpongeBob to deliver odes to era-specific animation styles, from flat-’n’-cheesy ’80s 2D to Steamboat Willie wiggly black-and-white to anime split-screens and psychedelic ’70s countercultural textures. That’s just frosting though, as all effort is directed to making us laugh, and I did. Next up: The SpongeBob Movie: The Search for SquarePants hits theaters in December, which is plenty of time for our laugh-strained abs to heal.
Our Call: And just think, it’ll be even funnier after the edibles hit. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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