REVIEWED -THE SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS MOVIE: TV's favourite porous sea-dwelling creature gets his own movie, but the makers have clearly absorbed the lessons from recent children's movie stinkers, writes Donald Clarke
SpongeBob SquarePants, the absorbent hero of a popular sub-aquatic cartoon series, has, alongside his - to use the tabloid vernacular - "best pal" Patrick Star, recently been identified by certain barmy fundamentalist organisations as an apologist for gay lifestyles. So is my enemy's enemy my friend? Without question. Though conspicuously short on steamy sponge-on-starfish action, Bob's first big-screen outing is such good fun that it seems a little wasted on the university students who will make up so much of the audience.
Of course, infants also adore Mr SquarePants and it is easy to see why. Either grinning manically or weeping Niagarously, he responds to life's vicissitudes - setbacks in his campaign to become manager of the Krusty Krab restaurant, the prospect of a Goofy Goober ice-cream sundae - with the same bi-polar vigour that colours the emotional spectrum of the average five-year-old. Whereas cynical trash like the horrible Shark Tale (scandalously nominated for an animation Oscar ahead of Bob) seems to have been devised by dryly observing toddler focus groups, this more rudely animated entertainment could have sprung directly from that little part of creator Stephen Hillenburg's id that refuses to grow up.
Featuring the most unnecessarily complicated plot since that of Beavis and Butthead do America, TSBSPM, written, perhaps, with one of script doctor Robert McKee's bibles to hand, sees our square-trousered protagonist and his echinoderm buddy setting forth from their home in Bikini Bottom to recover the crown of the despotic King Neptune. Along the way, after bathing in some characteristically throaty voice-work by Scarlett Johansson, they encounter a dangerous Hell's Angel, a submarine trench populated by sea monsters and, most horrifying of all, the real, living, breathing David Hasselhoff.
Blissfully free of both smug life lessons and jokes inserted solely to divert parents, the picture shrugs off the tyranny of its three-act structure to remain unpretentiously hysterical throughout. Take the little ones to this rather than The Magic Roundabout and, if there is still time left over before school recommences, take them again.
