The sea runs deep, and so does SpongeBob SquarePants. How else can you explain the beloved Nickelodeon animation franchise’s continued success more than 25 years after its debut?
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| The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants [Paramount Animation/Nickelodeon Movies] |
The most recent iteration of the square yellow dude’s story is The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants, the fourth theatrical SpongeBob feature, which arrives Friday, December 19 in theaters. This time, SpongeBob is trying to be a big man, and to prove it to Mr. Krabs, he follows the Flying Dutchman to the deepest part of the sea: the Underworld! Search for SquarePants is based on the TV series created by the late Stephen Hillenburg. Franchise veteran Derek Drymon directs from a screenplay by Pam Brady and Matt Lieberman, and a story by Marc Ceccarelli, Kaz and Brady.
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| Photo: Jay L. Clendenin for AFI, c/o Paramount Animation |
“Everybody has their own SpongeBob experience — they remember seeing an episode at a certain age, with family or during a particular moment in their life. As an artist, it’s pretty rare to have that connection.” — Director Derek Drymon
As usual, it stars Tom Kenny as SpongeBob, Clancy Brown as Mr. Krabs, Rodger Bumpass as Squidward, Bill Fagerbakke as Patrick Star, Carolyn Lawrence as Sandy Cheeks and Mr. Lawrence as Plankton. It also stars Mark Hamill as the Flying Dutchman, George Lopez, Ice Spice, Arturo Castro, Sherry Cola and Regina Hall.
For director Drymon, Search for SquarePants was a welcome return to Bikini Bottom after a few years away working for DreamWorks Animation, Illumination and Sony Pictures Animation, where he helmed Hotel Transylvania 4. But Drymon’s connection to SpongeBob goes back to before it was even a show, when he worked with series creator Hillenburg on Rocko’s Modern Life in the mid-1990s. He also worked extensively on SpongeBob Comics, which ran from 2011 to 2018.
“There was a while where I was like, ‘I’m done with SpongeBob,’” Drymon told Animation Magazine for their January ’26 issue. “But then … as time went on, I kind of missed those guys, missed the characters.”
Just Like Old Times
When schedules finally aligned, the time was right for Drymon to return and direct the new feature. “My agent said they’re thinking about doing a new movie, and would you be interested? And I was like, ‘Yeah, I would love it,’” he says.
The feature was first developed as a streaming project starring Mr. Krabs, and already included the Flying Dutchman and the journey to the Underworld, when Drymon came on board to work with long-running exec producers and showrunners Marc Ceccarelli and Vince Waller on the script. Their first draft was good enough to convince the studio to turn it into a theatrical feature with SpongeBob himself as the star. “That’s when it had a lot of changes,” Drymon says. “We brought in some new writers, and I helped fashion the story from there, but the core of the story was always there.”
Head of story Mark O’Hare, another veteran of the show, says the movie’s story is exciting because it takes SpongeBob to a new place, and Hamill’s Flying Dutchman was a “grand character.” But the real challenge was to make a SpongeBob movie using 3D animation that still felt like the 2D character and world everyone knows and loves. “In that sense, it’s very familiar to me, but it’s a challenge … to bring that to the stuff into the 3D world without sacrificing what we love about SpongeBob,” O’Hare says.
O’Hare says the story team developed a visual palette inspired by animation and by such disparate live-action influences as Sam Raimi’s films, the Coen brothers, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies and Phil Joanou’s 1987 cult comedy Three O’Clock High.
“We’re making fun of these movies but also honoring them,” O’Hare says. “The contrast between SpongeBob’s world and those dynamic 3D cinematic styles is a big part of the fun.”
“Every movie is different, and this one is very specific in the way it needs to work … You shoot it from one side, it looks amazing and hilarious. You just move the camera like 30 degrees either side, and it looks like a big mess.” — Head of story Mark O’Hare
Kent Seki served as head of cinematography early in production before handing off the job to Tom Bruno Jr. (on his way to directing the short Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey, which screens with the movie in theaters). Seki says he worked with Drymon to develop the movie’s look and shooting style, drawing on Pirates and Three O’Clock High. “We took those two films and applied them to SpongeBob as reference,” he says. “And we created a document, a sort of video documentation, as well as written documentation, of what to do there. And that was done remotely with Tom Bruno Jr., and then, when he came on, he took it and ran with it.”
Seki says SpongeBob is appealing because of his innocence. “He is not a cynical character in the least bit, and I think there’s something very appealing about that.”
Drymon says he tried not to think too much about what works and does not work in 3D versus 2D animation and instead approached the story from a creative perspective, relying on collaborators to help solve problems along the way. For example, Wes Mandell, head of character animation, told Drymon that the two types of animation are almost opposites. “He said, ‘If it’s easy in 2D, it’s really hard in CG, and if it’s easy in CG, it’s impossible in 2D,’” Drymon says.
“Every movie is different, and this one is very specific in the way it needs to work,” O’Hare says. Getting the rigs set up required a lot of work and specialized tools to achieve the right effect. “You shoot it from one side, it looks amazing and hilarious,” O’Hare says. “You just move the camera like 30 degrees either side, and it looks like a big mess.”
As always, one challenge of making a SpongeBob feature is that the character was designed for short-form content. “I remember, even when we did the first movie, Steve [Hillenburg] was really racking his brain, because the characters just worked in 11 minutes,” Drymon says. “How do you sustain 80 or 90 minutes?”
The other challenge was that the nature of the franchise resists the traditional movie arc, in which characters evolve over the course of the story. “On SpongeBob, you’ve got to leave the character how you found him, you know?” Drymon says. “How do you bring this character the audience knows and loves and — you don’t want to change them — but you want to give them some significant movement. You can dive deeper into the emotions with the characters, and you can kind of play around with having them feel something a little deeper than you would want to do in the 11-minute versions. And that’s always fun, to see the characters have some real emotions.”
That also translates into the movie’s visual aspect, allowing the filmmakers to heighten the danger and find moments of jeopardy that are more theatrical. “You don’t want to completely break out of our visual style that’s established in the show, but just kind of tweaking the camera a little bit, lowering it a little bit — subtle things that we wouldn’t normally do in the show — we can just do little tweaks like that and it really feels like something different,” Drymon says.
One example is with set design. “Like in the Krusty Krab, some shots make it feel gigantic, while others are very intimate and close — doors move everywhere, spaces stretch out,” Drymon says. “That’s the style of the show, and the audience probably won’t realize it, but it would feel wrong if we didn’t do it.”
Live action has appeared in SpongeBob movies before, but it was a new challenge for Drymon. While he originally planned to hire someone with live-action experience to direct those sequences, Drymon says producer Lisa Stewart encouraged him to tackle them himself. “It was like doing an animated movie, but all at one time,” he says. “In animation, you orchestrate in pieces; in live action, it’s everyone working together, and you have a take.”
Timeless Chuckles
Asked why SpongeBob continues to thrive, O’Hare points to the show’s ageless sense of humor. “Steve always wanted timelessness,” he says. “Everyone who’s ever worked on SpongeBob agrees — we want it to feel universal, not trendy.”
He’s particularly proud of the film’s dense comedy and big, theatrical moments. “There are jokes within jokes within jokes,” he says. “That’s what SpongeBob is — and why you can watch it multiple times and still find something new.”
“Working on this movie really felt like coming home,” O’Hare adds. “I just love it when people get excited to see SpongeBob again. This one couldn’t have come out better.”
Drymon agrees. After 25 years, SpongeBob has become more than a cartoon character, with kids who watched the first seasons now old enough to be watching with their own kids. “Everybody has their own experience — they remember seeing an episode at a certain age, with family, or during a particular moment in their life. As an artist, it’s pretty rare to have that connection.”
Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon Movies will launch The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants in theaters on December 19.
About The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants:
SpongeBob and his Bikini Bottom friends set sail in their biggest, all-new, can’t miss cinematic event ever…The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants. Desperate to be a big guy, SpongeBob sets out to prove his bravery to Mr. Krabs by following The Flying Dutchman – a mysterious swashbuckling ghost pirate – on a seafaring comedy-adventure that takes him to the deepest depths of the deep sea, where no Sponge has gone before.
The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants features the voices of Tom Kenny, Clancy Brown, Rodger Bumpass, Bill Fagerbakke, Carolyn Lawrence, and Mr. Lawrence, all respective roles from Nickelodeon's beloved animated series, along with guest stars George Lopez, Isis “Ice Spice” Gaston, Arturo Castro, Sherry Cola with Regina Hall, and Mark Hamill.
The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants is directed by Derek Drymon and executive produced by Marc Ceccarelli, Vincent Waller, Pete Chiappetta, Anthony Tittanegro, and Andrew Lary. It is produced by Lisa Stewart, p.g.a., Pam Brady, Aaron Dem. Based on the Series “SpongeBob SquarePants” Created by Stephen Hillenburg. The story is by Marc Ceccarelli & Kaz and Pam Brady. The screenplay is by Pam Brady and Matt Lieberman.
The movie will be accompanied by the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem short Chrome Alone 2: Lost in New Jersey. From producers Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, James Weaver, Jeff Rowe, and Ramsay McBean and directed by Kent Seki, the film reunites audiences with the Turtle brothers from the 2023 feature Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem for a festive adventure. When a mysterious toy company seeks to profit off the turtles’ new hero status, the brothers follow the clues to New Jersey and make a shocking discovery in this all new original short.
Watch the SpongeBob SquarePants Universe, including Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years and The Patrick Star Show on Nickelodeon and Paramount+! Try it FREE at ParamountPlus.com.
Shop SpongeBob: https://www.paramountshop.com/pages/spongebobsquarepants
Listen to The SpongeBob Musical here!
CALLING ALL GOOFY GOOBERS! (ROCK!) Are ya ready for a deep dive into the world of SpongeBob SquarePants? The SpongeBob YouTube channel is THE PLACE for all fan-favorite SpongeBob moments! Subscribe now at https://www.youtube.com/SpongeBobOfficial!
CALLING ALL GOOFY GOOBERS! (ROCK!) Are ya ready for a deep dive into the world of SpongeBob SquarePants? The SpongeBob YouTube channel is THE PLACE for all fan-favorite SpongeBob moments! Subscribe now at https://www.youtube.com/SpongeBobOfficial!
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