The Other Side of Animation 210: The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run Review

(If you like what you see, you can go to camseyeview.biz to see more of my work on video game reviews, editorials, lists, Kickstarters, developer interviews, and review/talk about animated films. If you would like, consider contributing to my Patreon at patreon.com/camseyeview. It would help support my work, and keeps the website up. Thanks for checking out my work, and I hope you like this review!)

Well, it’s finally out. If you have been following me and my cohost on Renegade Animation (on Renegade Pop Culture), we have made it a running joke to take a jab at anything SpongeBob-related due to the constant delays and radio silence around the US release of this film. We come off rather harsh, but only because Paramount acted like this was supposed to be this major release that just had to be in theaters. I mean, it got to be in theaters in other countries and got a Blu-ray release, but the US, for one reason or another, well, I know the reason, but still, had to wait until 2021 to finally see this movie. Really? Can you ever imagine that a company like Paramount would hold out for something like The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run? Well, they did! It’s finally out. 

Directed by Tim Hill, this CGI animated feature based on the long-running franchise went through quite a rocky development. It was originally announced back in 2015 after the release of Sponge Out of Water. You can read up about it as it went through titles like It’s a Wonderful Sponge, it had cat aliens at one point in the plot, and then it was supposed to mostly be an overall origin story for everyone’s favorite undersea characters. Granted, some of these elements would turn into the now notorious Kamp Koral spin-off series, but we are here to talk about the film. So, it was supposed to come out in 2019, but got pushed to 2020, and then it was pushed from the June 2020 release due to the pandemic, and then taken off the release schedule altogether. It got an overseas release and a theatrical release in Canada, but finally got released in the states on March 4th, 2021 to mostly above-average reviews. It just happens to be released alongside the Paramount+ Original, Kamp Koral. So, what do I think about this movie? Well, you will have to read on to find out! 

We follow everyone’s favorite underwater fry cook SpongeBob, voiced by Tom Kenny. It’s mostly a typical day for our favorite yellow sponge as he hangs out with his friends, goes to work, and gives his pet snail all of the love in the world. So, what’s the real plot? Well, on the other side of the ocean at the Lost City of Atlantic City, King Trident, voiced this time by Matt Berry, wants to keep up his looks, and part of that process is using the slime that is produced by snails. Unfortunately for him, the snail that he was using is all dried up. Furious at this news, he sends out a royal announcement and bounty for a snail to be delivered to him. PLankton, voiced by Mr. Lawrence, decides to take advantage of this coincidence and kidnap SpongeBob’s snail, Gary. After coming back from work, SpongeBob realizes that Gary has been snailnapped and sets off on an adventure with his best friend Patrick Star, voiced by Peter Fagerbakke, on an adventure with a robot-driven boat voiced by Awkwafina to get Gary back! 

I know on the podcast that I have been very critical about the release of this film, but I don’t hate this film. I have a few praises for it. First up to bat is the animation. If this film can lay claim to something, it is that it has some top-quality animation. I love the fact that the CGI looks like stop-motion. We are in an era where CGI animation is evolving with projects that are expanding on the ways we can use it with more cartoony physics and expressions without it looking weird. It’s some of the most expressive animation of 2021. They somehow made this all work by converting the 2D elements to CGI, and no matter how I feel about the rest of the film, it’s incredibly impressive. I would love to watch a behind-the-scenes look at how they made this animation work. It’s a film with an incredible and distinct visual identity, and I will always respect that. Outside of the animation, there were quite a few jokes where I found myself laughing. Even if all of the jokes didn’t land for me, the animation backed it up to still give me a chuckle. It’s still very zany, but it had the right vibe for my comedy preferences. The story itself is flawed, as we will get to that soon, but while it is partly connected to the spin-off, it does have a rather nice ending, and the overall idea of realizing how important someone is in your life is a solid idea for a theme.

The overall story feels very non-existent. It’s incredibly bare-bones, and it feels like either there was supposed to be more but it was cut, or maybe there was a different story, but it got cut and they had to keep the story simple, I’m not sure. The dialogue also comes off like they had a few meta-joke/commentary setups, but then while lampooning the tropes or the topic at hand, they fall back into said tropes. It feels like they wanted to avoid certain story tropes, but then indulged in the ones they were making fun of. Some elements are a touch messed up. For example, early on in the film, Sandy builds a robot prototype for Mr. Krabs to essentially put SpongeBob out of a job. Sure, it can sort of play off of the themes of the film, but I find it shocking Sandy did not have a second thought about putting her best friend out of a job! That’s horrifying. Luckily, that plot point doesn’t go anywhere, but the fact that there are a lot of plot elements that are introduced, quickly solved, or dropped throughout the film feels like there were some problems with producing the story. I also find it amusing that whole the franchise has never cared about continuity, the Kamp Koral stuff seen in the film doesn’t add up to the spin-off. I don’t care, but I find it an amusing observation. I wouldn’t mind a weak story, but the film’s comedy is very miss than hit. That’s a problem when your film is partly a comedy. 

After all of this build-up and after all of this frustration with having to wait a literal year for an already finished film when the film would have made its money back if it went through a virtual theater/theatrical/on-demand release because it’s SpongeBob, I just can’t find myself being mad about it. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a weak film, and I think the animation is the only thing that carries the experience, but after all that I went through with 2020 and this film having a flawed release, it’s not the worst film out there. I think if you are curious, it’s now on Paramount+ and the spin-off is there as well. Otherwise, maybe wait to find a Blu-ray of the film. I know it’s always a little deflating to build up all of this anger for a film that is in the end just okay, but it’s good to remember that there are worse things in the world than a middling SpongeBob movie. I’ll be back with a film that I consider the worst of 2021 so far, and you will have to wait to find out what it is! 

Thanks for reading the review! I hope you all enjoyed reading it! If you would like to support my work, make sure to share it out, and if you want to become a Patreon supporter, then you can go to patreon.com/camseyeview. I will see you all next time!

Rating: Rent it!

The Other Side of Animation 152: Wonder Park Review

(If you like what you see, you can go to camseyeview.biz to see more of my work on video game reviews, editorials, lists, Kickstarters, developer interviews, and review/talk about animated films. If you would like, consider contributing to my Patreon at patreon.com/camseyeview. It would help support my work, and keeps the website up. Thanks for checking out my work, and I hope you like this review!)

Like I said in my 150th review of the Godzilla Netflix Trilogy, I’m not really finding joy in reviewing movies I would consider bad. I do it, and will not falter in my opinions about them, but I take no joy in certain films that obviously had a rough development. Many things can go wrong with making animated films, and I can’t think of a rougher development for an animated film this year than Paramount and Nickelodeon’s Wonder Park. Honestly, as far as I can tell right now, Wonder Park had probably some of the most negative PR surrounding it before release. Starting development back in 2014, Wonder Park was animated by a studio in Spain called Ilion Animation Studios, the same studio that did 2009’s Planet 51 and the upcoming film Paramount/Skydance production, Luck. Then, in January of 2018, the original director, Dylan Brown, who was an animator for Pixar, was fired after sexual misconduct, and was replaced by David Feiss, Clare Kilner, and Robert Iscove. Well, you would not really know that, because the film is notorious for not having an actual literal director credit! Not even a fake director name. No one wanted full-fledged credit. Even after that trainwreck, it has been getting bombarded with negative reviews, and may be Paramount’s first flop of 2019. Yeah, let’s check it out, shall we?

The story follows this little girl name June, voiced by Brianne Denski. June, along with her mother, voiced by Jennifer Garner, has made this beautiful, vibrant, and outlandishly-creative theme park called Wonderland, where her stuffed animals help run it. These animals include a blue bear who greets the park guests named Boomer, voiced in the US by Ken Hudson Campbell and the UK version by Tom Baker, two beavers named Gus and Cooper, voiced in the US version by Kenan Thompson and Ken Jeong and in the UK version by Ryan Fitzgerald and Wippa, a wild boar that runs everything named Greta, voiced by Mila Kunis, and a porcupine that is the safety inspector named Steve, voiced by John Oliver. However, the most important animal in the park is a chimp named Peanut, voiced by Norbert Leo Butz, who is the park icon and ride creator. Unfortunately, as June started to build a smaller scale version of Wonderland, June’s mom gets sick and has to leave for a while. They won’t say what she is sick with exactly, but that really won’t matter as the story and my review goes on. She is now stuck with her dad, voiced by Matthew Broderick, and stews away in her sadness about the possibility of not seeing her mother again. After getting sent to math camp, June escapes the bus taking her to the camp, and stumbles into a forest, and with no real explanation, ends up in Wonderland, but nature decided to take it back. She ends up seeing her stuffed animals come to life as more “realistic-looking”, and the park is overrun by this ominous cloud of darkness that has wrecked the park with the help of the Chimpanzombies. Can June find a way to get her creative spark back and save the park? What about the fate of her mother? What about the fact that this park came to life with no real reason given how? Why is there no real director credit?

So, what happened? How did this film become such an unfocused $100 mil mess? It’s really tough to say what’s positive about it, because with every positive, comes a negative. For example, the animation is fine. It has solid enough animation, but it really doesn’t look like it cost $100 mil. Some of the movements look solid enough, but some movement styles are janky and too fast. With how fast the two beaver brothers move, you can’t really tell what they are doing when they are running or fighting with one another. The end credits literally cut out the characters from the film footage, and slaps them onto the big names. Not only that, but they either slow down or rewind the footage used to make it look like they made entirely original animation. It looks sloppy and rushed. The characters move well enough, but there aren’t that many little quirks outside of maybe Peanut and Boomer. No one has little movements that make each character feel like their own. Some of the shots and the rides are well-animated and shot well, but at other times, the camera is either too close or snapping back and forward like that one scene in Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s hard to know what’s fully going on. The film’s animation also lacks a bit of that creative spark that something like this film needs. Why don’t the animals look like their stuffed animal counterparts? They had CG models of the stuffed animals set up for each of them, but their “living” versions are just generic animals. The chimpanzombies and the Darkness could have been interesting, but due to how wonky, rushed, and undercooked the script is, they end up being very forgettable threats that you will not remember at all. I don’t really get how clunky the animation has been for Nickelodeon’s original films that get TV series. Even by the years they were released, with Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius back in 2001 and Barnyard back in 2006, they never look as good as other big studio films at those times. Oh, and Wonder Park also has this very heavy emphasis on shine and bloom effects. You know how video games during the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii generation really exploited the heck out of the bloom tool in games? That’s Wonder Park’s other notable animation issue. It looks like a short CGI film made by a student who was learning how to balance out CGI lighting tools. However, I will say that for foreign animation from Spain, it does look better than a lot of the films that I see that either look like they are almost at the Hollywood scale, or very straight-to-video.

So, the animation is a mixed to mostly negative bag, but what about the story, writing, and characters? Well, unfortunately, the one positive/one negative trick used above is sadly usable here. The story had potential to be more complex with how June is connected to the park with the animal characters being different symbolic forms of June. For example, Peanut is her imagination and optimism, and Steve is her current mood that’s all about safety regulations. Sadly, they really don’t go into that, or expand upon it. Because of the 85-minute runtime, it’s one of the few times an animated film should have been 120 minutes. You aren’t given time to breath, or know about the characters, or how the plot works. You are never told how the park came to life, how the animals don’t know who she is, and plenty of other story elements that don’t really get fleshed out. It’s great that June is a creative and imaginative individual, and I would argue that she would make a much better protagonist if she was given a better story and overall film. If the film didn’t introduce these themes that you have seen done better in Inside Out and A Monster Calls, then we wouldn’t be criticizing how lacking in punch the overall film feels. The writing is never creative, the jokes don’t land, and I don’t remember the character’s names, their personalities, or any real scenes. Due to how much of a rush the film is in to get itself done with, you are never caring on an emotional level, and that’s a shame. Again, there is stuff that could work here, but those elements are as under-baked as most baked desserts on Chopped.

In the end, I feel badly for the people that worked on Wonder Park. It’s the weakest animated film of 2019, and I don’t like saying that. There are elements of a much better movie hiding under all the flaws, and the fact that this entire film feels like a rush job to prepare viewers for the upcoming animated series, which may not happen now, or will go for a season before cancelation, says a lot. A lot of my issues with this film are because we know very little of what happened behind the scenes to make many of these issues center-stage, and I feel badly for the animators and production people who may or may not have had a great work schedule to get this completed. It won’t change my opinion on the film, but I would, at the very least, understand what went down. I feel like with a better direction and more time to actually flesh out certain elements of this film, it could have been a solid gem that would have found a cult following. Who knows, maybe a few years down the line we might re-review films like this, and find something we missed the first time around. I simply don’t recommend seeing Wonder Park. It will probably find its way onto Netflix in the future, and or maybe Amazon Prime. Until then, just go see How to Train your Dragon: The Hidden World, The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, or try to find screenings for some of the upcoming foreign animated features coming out, like This Magnificent Cake!, Penguin Highway, or Okko’s Inn. Until then, just wait until Missing Link comes out in April. For now, since we have some time before Laika’s newest feature, how about we talk about some smaller releases that I think people should check out? Next time, let’s talk about a really cool female-directed animated feature called Maquia: When the Promised Flowers Bloom. Thanks for reading! I hope you all enjoyed the review, and let’s hope we can learn about Wonder Park’s development history in more educated detail in the future! I will see you all next time!

Rating: The Worst/Blacklist