"Plankton: The Movie" is about as good a movie spinoff, based on the tiny antagonist of one of the longest running animated series of all time ("SpongeBob SquarePants"), can be. It's ostensibly about Plankton (voiced by co-writer Mr. Lawrence) learning the value of marriage, as his egotistical and selfish behavior drove away his computer-wife Karen (voiced by Jill Talley), but it's really just an approximate ninety minute excuse for candy-coated visuals, sight-gags and puns, and I liked it. I sat there on my couch constantly amused, if not all-the-while wondering what the point of all this was.
If you're a fan of the show (and if not, why the hell are you here?), you'll know that Plankton's whole shtick is his obsession with trying to steal the Krabby Patty secret formula from the owner of the Krusty Krab, a one Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown), and then conquer the world as cartoon villains do, and the film opens up with his latest attempt. But after twenty five years, Plankton's better half is fed up, not with her husband's lifelong quest at thievery, but about how he doesn't respect her. And after she converts The Chum Bucket, his competing restaurant, into a successful one, he explodes and kicks all the customers out, be it out of jealousy or idiocy I'm not sure. This is her last straw, and she decides not only to leave him but to conquer the world herself; she even nabs the secret formula within a few seconds. Oh what is a little copepod to do?
Karen ends up taking all the metal in Bikini Bottom (where the show's located) to build her world-dominating machine. Plankton is left with an empty plot of seafloor where his eatery once stood, and immediately sets out to rule the world himself; he even ends up tricking SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) into helping him, the naive porous pal thinking he wants to win back his wife. The plot is your usual sugary confetti stuff, but there is a whiff of sophistication in the concept of a children's cartoon character learning to mature and love another. It's not exactly Pixar, but hey, who is?
There's a running joke where SpongeBob hypnotizes Plankton, as he tries to figure out what caused her to leave him, and these were some of my favorite moments: we not only get a bit more backstory in a show about a talking yellow sponge, but frequently a musical number and often an animation change. Part of me wishes the whole thing was one big song-and-dance flashback.
But this brings me to perhaps the biggest failing with "Plankton: The Movie," the animation. Not that it's necessarily bad; it's smooth, zany and filled with the show's personality, but something's off. The textures all look flat, like a feature-length and fully voiced video game that I'm watching someone else play. Its distracting, sterile and distractingly sterile.
It's also worth noting how this (and last year's spinoff "Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie," which is unseen by me) debuts on Netflix, instead of Paramount+, considering they own the property. I imagine money is the reason why giving their own streamer original content wasn't the priority here, which just goes to show you what happens when you let Mr. Krabs run a business.
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