The Bob’s Burgers Movie (PG-13)
As ever, the Belcher family’s burger restaurant teeters on the brink while the Belcher kids involve themselves in hijinx in The Bob’s Burgers Movie, a fun feature-length presentation of the animated TV series.
Bob’s Burgers apparently just wrapped up its 12th season, which is probably something like 10 more seasons than I watched. I didn’t stop watching for any specific reason; it’s just one of those shows that fell off my regular viewing rotation list. This movie will likely put it back, especially since off-kilter but ultimately kind comedy is especially appealing to me at the moment.
As in the show, Bob Belcher (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin, a vocal talent for the ages) and his wife, Linda (voiced by John Roberts), own Bob’s Burgers, a burger-based restaurant that always feels like it’s on the edge of closing. At the moment, the restaurant is literally one week from losing its equipment to repossession by the bank to whom the Belchers are behind on a loan payment. So things were looking rough even before a giant sinkhole opened right in front of the restaurant, making it hard for customers to even get inside.
The Belcher kids — eighth-grader Tina (voice by Dan Mintz), 9-year-old Louise (Kristen Schaal) and somewhere-in-between brother Gene (Eugene Mirman) — like all kids both root for and pity their parents while dealing with various dramas of their own. Tina is struggling with whether to ask Jimmy Pesto Jr. (also voiced by Benjamin) to be her summer boyfriend. Gene is trying to keep a band together to play at an upcoming festival. Louise is worried that she might not be brave, and that the pink bunny-eared hat that she always wears really is, as a classmate says, a sign that she’s a baby.
Louise decides that the way to prove her badassedness is to video herself going into the sinkhole, which leads to the discovery of a long-buried body, which leads to murder charges for the burger restaurant’s building owner, Calvin Fischoeder (Kevin Kline). Fischoeder’s legal woes further imperil the restaurant, so Louise decides it’s up to her to save the family by proving that he is innocent and uncovering the real murderer.
Somewhere in the middle of watching this movie I realized that I was deeply enjoying two elements in particular: joke density and small nuggets of surprising earnestness. A concept regularly discussed on the podcast Extra Hot Great and in other TV commentary, joke density is the fast-and-furiousness of the jokes, not just the “set up, laugh” but the small asides, little nuances of delivery, bits of sight business and small gestures that can pack oodles of laughs into every minute of a TV show or movie. It’s been long enough since I watched Bob’s Burgers that I forgot that this is often a high joke density property, with layers of humor in every line. It keeps the energy up without being messily frenetic and, even though maybe it shouldn’t, it adds to the “genuine oddballs” nature of these characters. Though everything about the Belcher family should read as, well, cartoony, they feel tonally real because if you’re lucky, every family is a charming gang of weirdos who love each other in part because of their weirdness.
Which brings me to the earnestness. Like unexpectedly large chunks of cookie dough in your cookie dough ice cream, this movie had a few moments of familial sweetness that delighted me. Because of how un-saccharine these characters are, they can really sell these moments and grab you in the throat right in the middle of, say, a fart joke.
All this is packaged inside a bit of capering on the part of the adults — their schemes to keep the restaurant afloat lead to an unlicensed food cart and Linda dressed like a burger that for some reason is wearing a bikini — and vaguely Scooby-Doo-ish mystery adventure for the kids, what with their bike rides to the nearby amusement park on the wharf and their uncovering of secret passages. And there is a wonderfully fitting bit of song work that actually has to be quite skilled to seem as “we are not professional singers” as it is.
The Bob’s Burgers Movie doesn’t require in-depth knowledge of the series to enjoy it, just a willingness to get to know (or renew your acquaintance with) this delightfully relatable cartoon family. B+
Rated PG-13 for rude/suggestive material and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Loren Bouchard and Bernard Derriman with a screenplay by Loren Bouchard and Nora Smith, The Bob’s Burgers Movie is an hour and 42 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Twentieth Century Studios.
Featured photo: The Bob’s Burgers Movie.
