I want to be fair to The Sandy Cheeks Movie. While I grew up loving SpongeBob, I have to accept that, being in my late 20s’, I’m not the franchise’s target audience. I’ll share my true feelings about Saving Bikini Bottom but also consider how it’ll perform to its main demographic.

Kids will certainly appreciate the film’s humour and backstory of its titular character. However, the quality of the animation and the directions the plot takes results in a bizarrely unsatisfying experience.

When Bikini Bottom is scooped up out of the ocean, leaving only Sandy and SpongeBob, they venture to Sandy’s home state of Texas to confront the scientists responsible. On their way, they encounter Sandy’s family, who join them on their mission to retrieve the stolen city.

The Characters

For a spin-off of SpongeBob, Sandy is both the best and worst choice of lead. Her lack of flaws makes her ripe for character development but sapless for comedy.

Despite being a stranger in a strange land, Sandy typically comes across as the ‘normal’ one amongst the cast. She isn’t overly childish like SpongeBob or Patrick, greedy like Mr Krabs or sarcastically cynical like Squidward.

Fortunately, Saving Bikini Bottom recognises this and wisely casts Sandy as the stoic lead of her own hero’s journey. Meanwhile, SpongeBob and the other characters provide the laughs, as they should.

Sandy’s arc has little sense of development or chronology. Her journey plays like a compilation of scenes rather than a progression. It’s not until the climax that, all of a sudden, Sandy has all these realisations and difficult decisions to consider. It’s only in these final scenes that Sandy encounters a genuine dilemma, something she should’ve experienced an hour beforehand.

Toward’s the film’s midpoint, we meet Sandy’s family, who’re a travelling circus. As Sandy reminisces with her relatives, we learn that during her childhood she rejected her family’s showbiz career for science. For a moment, there’s some tension between her and her family as both parties express regret over their parting from one another. Unfortunately, this potential for drama is immediately shattered when Sandy’s family reveal that they still love her and are happy she went out and lived her own life.

With no jokes and no arc, Sandy Cheeks is even more dull here, in her titular feature, than she is in the show.

If anyone enjoyed watching the villains in this, I’d like them to reach out to me and explain their reasons because I got nothing out of them.

The only thing that stands out about them is their motive for stealing Bikini Bottom, specifically that of the main villain played by Wanda Sykes. Her supervillain origin story is the creepiest and most bizarre put to film.

The Animation

The last SpongeBob film I saw, Sponge on the Run, was so generic and heartless I couldn’t be bothered to write a review of it. It was the worst film I saw that year as I noted in my Best and Worst of 2020 post, however if there was one thing I did like about that film it was the animation.

Like the recent Spider-Verse films, Sponge on the Run perfected the mix of 2D and 3D animation. The characters had more dimension while still resembling the cartoons from the show.

The Sandy Cheeks Movie tries to create a similar look with varying levels of success. In some scenes the animation’s almost on par with Sponge on the Run, in others it resembles the SpongeBob PS2 games I played growing up.

The quality is at its absolute worst when it’s beside live-action human beings and this doesn’t just apply to how SpongeBob and the gang look. Without getting into spoilers, there are sequences where Wanda Sykes’ character interacts with animated elements, which are so appallingly rendered my jaw dropped when I saw them.

I’d definitely recommend it for kids who like SpongeBob. The storytelling is far from Disney or Pixar standards but the tone is line with the show’s. I’d only recommend it to people of my age and older for Wanda Sykes’ backstory and the atrocious animation around her. Trust me. Both need to be seen to be believed.

I give Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie a fair 5 out of 10.