Go 'sea' this worthwhile cartoon

Who sticks to his formula to placate his viewers? Spongebob Squarepants! Absorbent, yellow and comically safe is he! Spongebob Squarepants!\nNickelodeon has a record of turning any popular animated series into a feature length film, and each time it has proved disastrous. "Hey Arnold! The Movie" and "The Wild Thornberrys Movie" couldn't capture the little appeal each series had, and there's a reason why "Doug's 1st Movie" turned out to be his last. But with three successful "Rugrats" movies raking in the dough, Nickelodeon can't resist a chance to cash in, especially with a series like "Spongebob Squarepants," which holds lots of crossover appeal with audiences up to their thirties. Unfortunately for our readers, the silver screen version of "Spongebob" tends to favor children rather than the stoners who love to sit around and watch the cartoon between "Halo 2" tournaments.\nIn the film, Spongebob and his starfish friend Patrick go on an epic journey to stop the evil Plankton from taking over the world. The standard plot is filled with the cringingly uplifting moral of "kids can do anything adults can do," since for some reason Spongebob and Patrick are suddenly kids in this movie. Celebrity voice cameos such as Scarlett Johansson and Alec Baldwin fail to add anything for kids who won't recognize them, but David Hasselhoff's sequence does invoke genuine, if not cheap, laughs.\nThe bright side is since most animated films (with the exception of Pixar's masterpieces) have royally sucked in the past few years, this film stands on its own. It doesn't explore any new sea, but it keeps the flavor that has kept the TV show so hip.\nParents are going to have to drag their kids to crappy family movies, which is the only reason I can see how commercial crap like "Shrek 2" and "Shark Tale" kills at the box office. At least with this kids flick, you can resist playing billiards on your cell phone and enjoy the $8 you spent by actually laughing.\nFor a decade now -- since "The Lion King" -- we've been without good (non-CGI) animated movies. In this desert of horrible kids' movies, this movie stands as a sip of water, but not the bottle of Gatorade for which we still wait.