For star Carolyn Lawrence, who has voiced the spunky sea-dwelling squirrel since 1999, along with director Liza Johnson and ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ showrunners Marc Ceccarelli and Vincent Waller, talks over countless years of giving SpongeBob’s spunky friend her own film never bore fruit… until they finally did; debuts August 2 on Netflix.
Sandy Cheeks was one of Carolyn Lawrence’s earliest voice-acting jobs and, after voicing the spunky undersea squirrel for 25 years, it remains her longest-running role.
“All the characters are fun to play,” notes Lawrence of creatures inhabiting the Emmy Award-winning animated TV series, SpongeBob SquarePants. “They're incredibly well written, and Steve Hillenberg was so brilliant in how he put the whole world together. But Sandy is personally fun for me to play because I like everything about her. I like that she's loyal. I like that she's smart. I like that she's not afraid to do things and she'll stick up for her friends. And it's easy to play a character that you actually really enjoy.”
Over the decades, as Sandy became a fan favorite for audiences as well, it sparked many discussions about possibly giving SpongeBob’s athletic and scientifically-inclined friend a feature film of her own. But those talks went on for years, as talks about shows that would be great often do, never amounting to anything but talk – until now.
The 3DCG animated Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie from Nickelodeon Animation Studios and United Plankton Pictures, which follows the heroic journey of Sandy (Lawrence) and SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) to Sandy’s family home in Texas in their efforts to save their Bikini Bottom town from a villainous CEO, debuts August 2 on Netflix. For Lawrence, it’s a dream come true.
Check out the trailer:
“I kept hearing whispers,” she shares. “I’d be at an industry dinner or whatever and somebody would bring up a Sandy movie. And after so many years, I was like, ‘I guess it’s not happening.’ Then, all of a sudden, it was here. It was shocking.”
Executive producer Marc Ceccarelli, who has worked on the SpongeBob franchise since 2011 shared, “I actually pitched the idea for a Sandy Cheeks movie back in 2015 after The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water came out. At the time, it didn’t take. But a few years later, when we were approached about making another SpongeBob film, we had this one sitting in our back pockets. And, with Sandy being one of the only characters that comes from the surface, it gave us a lot of room to play with her backstory.”
Besides being a thrill-seeking squirrel from Texas, who wears an air-filled diving suit to breathe underwater and happens to be an expert in karate, there is very little known about Sandy’s backstory, her family, and her life on the surface. Even Lawrence was never given a real backstory for her character.
“I never knew Sandy’s backstory, who her family was, and I was curious,” she says. “I’ve been playing her all these years, and I didn’t have her full world in my mind. I mean, I made up my own things and some were right. I certainly didn’t know she could fly.”
The film establishes that Sandy comes from a circus family of flying squirrels who, outside of inventing things out of necessity as tiny creatures living in a very big world, do not share Sandy’s affinity for science.
“I was really moved by learning that her life as a badass scientist, which looks so effortless, hasn’t been effortless,” notes the film’s director Liza Johnson, known for her live-action directorial credits for series like The Last of Us and Dead to Me. Saving Bikini Bottom is actually Johnson’s first time directing an animated feature. “Sandy has the chops and the talent to live the dream her parents planned for her, but she can’t do that and be the squirrel she wants to be. So, she had to go venture out into the world and build a new life. And then we get to see her use all her skills–all her science skills and her karate skills and her circus skills–to get her community back.”
Lawrence agrees, “It has been neat to get to see Sandy’s family and understand more of who she is and why she’s this way. I love her family’s dynamic and this idea that Sandy is branching out from what her family expected of her, but she still has their support. There are a lot of themes in there that resonate with me.”
Getting to meet and unpack Sandy’s family of performers and inventors was one of the production highlights for Ceccarelli and fellow executive producer Vincent Waller, who has been working on SpongeBob since its first season.
“We had previously established that they were a stunt family and Sandy was a water-skiing squirrel,” notes Waller. “We’ve also shown one of her sisters before, but that was pretty much a one-off. Marc actually did the first exploratory drawings of Sandy’s family, which we tried to stick to pretty closely.”
Well, as closely as one can while referencing low-definition background pictures.
“When we started the movie, we went back to see what we had done before for Sandy’s family and all that really existed was a couple of family pictures in the background of her house,” says Ceccarelli. “And those were so tiny that even when we blew them up, we could barely see any details. So, there was a good deal of starting from scratch.”
There was also a lot of wiggle room when it came to what all to include in the film’s narrative, since the story left in Ceccarelli’s back pocket from 2015 was mostly a general outline of a story focused on Sandy’s lab scooping up Bikini Bottom and the young squirrel having to go back to her old home to retrieve her new one.
“I hadn't developed it further than that and, honestly, I can’t even recall how involved her family was in the original pitch,” shares Ceccarelli. “I know that was expanded upon a lot more in this final version.”
Johnson adds, “The challenge I had to learn as a first-time director for an animation is that animators never stop writing. They just keep changing stuff. They’d be like, ‘We’re finding the story.’ And I’d say, ‘But I liked your story.’ But every change they made would make the story better.”
On the animation side, Ceccarelli and Waller note the biggest challenge was all the fur in Sandy and her family’s character designs.
“We had to be careful because it could get too ruffled,” explains Waller. “And if the fur looked too ruffled, she’d look like a squirrel who’s not only from Texas but a Texas trailer park. I should know.”
Originally from Texas himself, Waller says that though he didn’t get to include much of the scenery from his own hometown, the film does feature impressive rock formations that can actually be found in Texas.
“Be warned, though,” notes Waller. “The rocks look much bigger in the movie because it’s from the viewpoint of a squirrel. I saw these giant rock formations on the screen, and I was like, ‘How did I miss something like that when I lived there?’ And then I later found out those rocks are only chest high. But it made for a beautiful landscape for our film.”
Aside from keeping Sandy and her family away from the trailer trash look, the team notes production on the film was relatively smooth and, most importantly, buckets of fun. Lawrence says, as excited as she is for the world to see Saving Bikini Bottom, working on this movie has made her excited for how the writing team will find ways to further expand SpongeBob’s universe.
“We’ve busted our universe open a little bit more, added some more characters, and I'll be excited to see what our amazing writers come up with moving forward,” says Lawrence. “I hope we get to do more with Sandy’s trouble-maker brother. He’s so much trouble, but you just love him.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
