The Bob’s Burgers Movie (2022 | US | 102 minutes | Loren Bouchard, Nora Smith)
Welcome into the world of Bob’s Burgers, a long-running animated series on FOX. It features a ridiculous little family (the Belchers) who fights tooth and nail to keep their shabby chic burger joint open despite constant setbacks and weird twists and turns (they get far more than their fair share). Some of the best episodes are peppered with musical numbers that sit in your head for days or weeks. It’s one of the best family-friendly feel-good shows on these days. Along the lines of The Simpsons it’s graced the airwaves for a whopping twelve years and still going strong. The film iteration of this quirky show is really just an extended version of any given episode from the last decade but you won’t hear me complain. The songs are plentiful, the jokes are snort-worthy and the Belchers are still the wonderful weirdos that you can’t help but love.
With the warm embrace of summer upon them, school break mere days away, a disaster in front of the restaurant throws a wrench in all their plans and threatens their livelihood once again. While Linda and Bob try to cook up a scheme to keep the family afloat, the kids are off on their own adventure to discover the truth behind a decades-old mystery.
While I can’t reveal too much of the twists and turns of The Bob’s Burgers Movie, it’s almost exactly what you’d expect with maybe 20% more pizzaz than its episodic precursors. The animation is a bit more detailed, the storyline a little more fleshed out. Despite the longer duration, there really wasn’t much downtime with each member of the family entrenched in their own personal turmoil, plenty to keep you captivated. If you love the show, you’ll have a great time with the movie, that’s the long and short of it. At over 100 minutes, it did feel slightly overextended, but honestly I didn’t even notice until about 5 minutes before the credits started rolling so it’s not a dealbreaker by any stretch.
My only other small complaint is the lack of characters included in the storyline. With so much extra screen time to round up all the usual suspects (and then some) they were suspiciously compact with the cast. While you’ve got the core cast heavily involved, I missed seeing some of my favorite secondaries like Regular Sized Rudy, Ollie and Andy, and even Jimmy Pesto.
The Bob’s Burgers Movie arrives in theaters on May 27th