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For more than 25 years, SpongeBob SquarePants and his pals in Bikini Bottom have made animation fans of all ages laugh. But it turns out that even everyone’s favorite porous pal needs some help to save that ocean-floor oasis, giving his scientific squirrel pal a shot at the stardom she deserves in the feature Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie, premiering August 2 on Netflix.
“I would hear whispers at work that there was something happening, and it might be Sandy,” says Carolyn Lawrence, who’s voiced Sandy since the start of the SpongeBob animation empire. “So, when I got the call that it actually was happening, I couldn’t believe it. It felt like it came out of nowhere, even though it had been years in the making.”
The feature-length adventure sees Bikini Bottom scooped up by a research lab headed by Sue Nahmee — say it out loud — played in live action by Wanda Sykes. This forces Sandy to tap into her scientific know-how to find her missing home and, along with SpongeBob and pals, try to get it back to where it belongs. Along the way, they run into Sandy’s family — a group of traveling circus performers — to help them track down and restore Bikini Bottom.
Sandy in the Spotlight
Executive producer Marc Ceccarelli says Saving Bikini Bottom had a long gestation period. “I first pitched this … back when we were all doing a round table of pitching movie ideas for the third movie, and we ended up not using this one at that time,” he says. “But then, a few years later, they decided they wanted to do something specifically with Sandy-centric stories, so we kind of had that story in our back pocket, and we pulled it out again and developed it further, and it became this.”
Although the SpongeBob franchise has often mixed animation and live action, Saving Bikini Bottom developed its own blend of CG animation and live action that gives familiar characters a new look.
The feature is directed by Liza Johnson, a newcomer to animation whose credits include episodes of The Last of Us, A Series of Unfortunate Events and Dead to Me. “It’s much more of a break with the animated world, and the script that I was sent was much more integrated, where in the beginning and end of the movie, it’s very fully animated, but in the middle, in the big middle, it’s very integrated, like between the kind of photographic world and the animated world,” she says.
Ceccarelli says they chose Johnson based on her work directing a Season 2 episode of the FX comedy series What We Do in the Shadows, titled “The Curse.” The episode had Ceccarelli’s favorite joke in the series, where the vampires abandon the show’s mockumentary film crew in a house full of rival vampires. “When they told me that she had directed that, I was like, ‘Oh, great!’” he says.
“I was a little surprised as well to, you know, be invited to do something that has so much animation in it, just because I’ve never done it before, but I was really excited to do it with [animation supervisor] Piero Piluso,” Johnson says. “Together, we were really able, I think, to do something that’s quite hybrid.”
Johnson started work early on to storyboard the entire movie and create an integrated look for the mix of live action and animation.
“What we tried to do is make the kind of most elevated design of each character, most elevated surfacing of each character and, I think most important to the franchise, the most specific and detailed acting for each character,” Johnson says. “We really tried to make sure that as we got through all the stages that we retained the specificity and the detail of those motions.”
All this was a quick education in animated filmmaking for Johnson. “We each had to learn a lot of new vocabulary,” she says. “There are words that are really common for animators that were new to me, and also words that are really common for live action that I was the only one to say them.”
‘Part of the struggle early on was I am so high energy when I play her that they always asked me to slow down. I remember Steve Hillenburg used to hold up a sign to me at the recording studio that said, “Slow down!” It was like, “I can’t slow down; I’m a squirrel!”‘
— Actor Carolyn Lawrence
The pushed animation style of the SpongeBob universe, combined with the story’s requirements and technical and budget limitations, all were factors in deciding how certain sequences would look to ensure “that everything that people love and care about each character is still present, even though we’re doing it in new conditions,” she says.
Johnson says the movie’s strength is Sandy’s character arc. “I think a lot of people can relate to the challenge to grow up on your own and to become the person that you want to be, which, as often as not, is perhaps not exactly the life that your family, your biological family, designed for you,” she says. “And I think that it presents a depth of understanding of who Sandy is. I think in most episodes of the show, we understand that she’s a competent scientist that’s found herself in this amazing underwater environment, and she’s going around doing competent things down there, but I don’t think that we’ve ever really had the chance to think about how she got there, or whether that was hard, or what she might have done to overcome those obstacles.”
Executive producer Vincent Waller says that the franchise’s ability to support movies and series with supporting characters is a testament to the strength of the show, created by the late Stephen Hillenburg, and the care taken in developing its world and characters.
“When we first started, it was really all about SpongeBob, and if SpongeBob wasn’t on screen for about three seconds, people started getting antsy and going, ‘Where’s SpongeBob?’” says Waller. “But after all these years of soaking into the — I was gonna say the pores of America, but it’s really the pores of the world — suddenly, it’s like you can chase Squidward, you can chase Sandy, and people are interested in her and they want to know her backstory.”
Besides Lawrence, the movie stars SpongeBob regulars Tom Kenny as SpongeBob SquarePants, Bill Fagerbakke as Patrick Star, Mr. Lawrence as Plankton, Clancy Brown as Mr. Krabs and Rodger Bumpass as Squidward. New roles include Sandy’s family members, voiced by Johnny Knoxville, Craig Robinson, Grey Griffin and Ilia Isorelýs Paulino; and live-action turns by Matty Cardarople and Sykes. The movie’s story is by Kaz, and a teleplay by Kaz and Tom Stern.
Having embodied Sandy for 25 years, Lawrence says she loved the script immediately. “I liked Liza’s vision for it and I thought the team did a great job writing it, and it was fun for me after 25 years to learn things about [Sandy], like, Oh, I’d never met her family. I didn’t know who her family was. I didn’t know she was from Galveston. Like, it’s fresh and exciting to me.”
As with any actor and the character they play, Lawrence’s relationship with Sandy has evolved and changed over the years. “Part of the struggle early on was I [was] so high energy when I play her that they always asked me to slow down. I was always talking too fast. I remember Steve Hillenburg used to hold up a sign to me at the recording studio that said, ‘Slow down!’ It was like, ‘I can’t slow down; I’m a squirrel!’”
Texan Treasure
And Sandy’s not just any squirrel — she has musical numbers to perform. “It was really fun and terrifying at the same time, because I really wanted it to be good, and I’m not a naturally fantastic singer — even though I do think singing as a squirrel gives you some freedom,” Lawrence says.
Sandy has always been known to be from Texas, though the specifics of her background have never been well defined — until now.
“Early on, it was interesting because they were concerned about her accent, and they were worried that the kids viewing wouldn’t understand certain words,” Lawrence says. “I would kind of have to come in and out of the accent if they thought something wasn’t clear, but I feel like as the show’s gone on, they’ve given me more free rein just to play her however it happens.”
After all this time, Sandy’s become more than just a character to her fans — and to Lawrence. “I didn’t realize this until today, actually, that watching it, I no longer felt like it was an animated character or a live-action character. It is so beautiful,” she says. “Oh, my gosh, I’m so lucky!”
Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie premieres on Netflix on August 2.
