The only female creature in the sea, apparently, and an obvious blue-stocking - or blue-flipper - Mindy is briskly dismissive of all the childish males with whom she is surrounded, from her father all the way down to SpongeBob. The film’s real hero is not SpongeBob but Mindy, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, a bespectacled mermaid supposed to be King Neptune’s daughter. For here any vestige of heroism has to endure a more-or-less specifically feminist debunking. Parents, lulled by The Incredibles into supposing that for all the dangerously delightful comedy at the expense of heroism the kids are still getting a somewhat wholesome message, might want to take note. Of course, you might almost have expected this from a heroic narrative whose heroes are a sponge and a starfish, but it just goes to show you how accustomed we have grown to the weird, po-mo film language of our times that it comes as a bit of a surprise.

Every conceivable temptation to real heroism is not only resisted but scorned and ridiculed and the heroic narrative itself, in the form of a quest by SpongeBob (voice of Tom Kenny) and his pal Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke) to find and return the crown of King Neptune (Jeffrey Tambor), is left in what can only be called a pile of smouldering ruins. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, directed by Sherm Cohen and Stephen Hillenburg, takes the latter course. Or it can take a hard line and insist that the parody remain a parody, the heroes only laughably and not in any sense 'really' heroic. It can, like The Incredibles, allow itself to be seduced by the ethos of what it is parodying, namely the comic-book heroism that is itself a parody of earlier forms of literary heroism.

The post-modern feature length cartoon can go in one of two directions.

The spongebob squarepants movie mindy