Returning to Bikini Bottom is like going home for Derek Drymon. For nearly three decades, he’s worked alongside SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg on creating the underwater world and all its critters, not least of all the eponymous sponge himself. Now, having withstood the test of time and streaming, Drymon sits in the director’s chair for the upcoming feature The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants. This marks Drymon’s second feature film as director, after helming Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania. In an interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, at the 2025 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the writer/director tells us that his first gig as head honcho on set provided him with the confidence to tackle Search for SquarePants, which takes fans to the very depths of the ocean, where SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) must go toe-to-toe with The Flying Dutchman, played by the legendary Mark Hamill. Check out the full conversation below to find out what hard and fast rules for working on SpongeBob have remained the same since the ’90s, and why Drymon believes the little guy has resonated with fans for so long. The director also shares his experience teaming up with Hamill (again) and the unexpected approach they took for The Flying Dutchman in Search for SquarePants.
‘Hotel Transylvania’ Gave Derek Drymon the Confidence to Take on SpongeBob

“Having that experience just gave me more confidence.”

COLLIDER: You worked on Hotel Transylvania 4. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve worked in the industry for decades, but I want to say that was your first feature. DEREK DRYMON: Yes. Well, the first that I directed. I’ve been in features at DreamWorks for a long time. I would imagine that with everything you work on, you learn life lessons. Directing and helming your first feature animated film with Hotel, what was something really big that you learned making that that surprised you that you wanted to take with you to SpongeBob? DRYMON: Geez. I think just starting something at the beginning and getting through it. The length of a feature is an experience in itself. It’s just like doing shorts, but longer. Features are hard — 80 minutes, 90 minutes, telling a story, keeping the audience interested for that long. It’s tricky. It’s not just expanding on a shorts, it’s trying to find those elements that will keep an audience engaged for that amount of time. And that goes from the writing and story stage, all the way through to the editing and sound, and all those things. So, getting through one gave me the confidence that I could do this. So, going into SpongeBob, I guess having that experience just gave me more confidence that when things got tricky or things weren’t quite working out, or it looked like it was all going to fall apart, we’ve got to hang in there, stick with it. It’ll work itself out.
What Makes SpongeBob Special Is What Makes Him Just Like Everyone Else

“He’s this innocent kid who’s kind of naive, dances through life…”

Image via Federico Napoli

You’ve been working on SpongeBob, if I’m not mistaken, since ‘99. DRYMON: I started working with Steve [Hillenburg] on it before he sold it. I think the first time I ever talked about it was really ‘96. So a long time. It’s really hard to have characters stand the test of time and have multiple generations follow. What do you think it is about SpongeBob that actually had such a long life with so many different people? DRYMON: When we were making SpongeBob, it was always with the idea of just making each other laugh, making the room laugh, whoever’s there. A lot of it started in the writing room. We would pull from each other’s childhoods, things that happened to us as kids, and then try to translate that into a universal [experience], so it’s not so specific to one person, but something that anybody as a kid could relate to, which is fitting in, making friends. A lot of it’s about friendship and fitting in and wanting to belong. No matter what generation you happen to be in, we all want the same thing. So, I think that’s kind of the core: what does SpongeBob want? He’s this innocent kid who’s kind of naive, dances through life, and what he really wants to do is he wants to belong to his friends, and he wants to fit in with his friends.
What Are the Rules of SpongeBob?

Embrace the square.

Image via Paramount Pictures

When you’re directing a SpongeBob movie, if someone comes in and is trying to do something or add something to the character, are there certain rules, like the five rules of SpongeBob? DRYMON: I wouldn’t say it’s so locked down, but I would talk to story artists and animators with the same ideas. If you’re trying to move a character across the room, trying to move SpongeBob around, have him walk or do anything, a lot of times I’d see drawings and they would have almost a cliched cartoon kind of stretch-squash move around, and I would say SpongeBob’s a lot stiffer. He’s a square. He’s stubby. So, even if he just walks across the room, he should do so in a different way, in a stubby, stiff kind of way. He’s nerdy. If you imagine it, if Bugs Bunny could walk across the stage this way, that’s not how SpongeBob would do that. So, a lot of it is just about getting people to think about even moving the character in a way that embraces the idea of a square. Symmetry is another thing. When Steve was designing the character, I think he was really interested in the idea of symmetry. In school, you’re always trained in asymmetry, to be asymmetrical when you’re drawing — one eye slightly bigger than the other, just to keep interest — and he just went against that. You cut SpongeBob down the middle and he’s the same either which way. So, those are different ways of thinking than if you’re normally trained. Again, it’s just kind of the look and how he moves. Like I said, we didn’t really have a set of rules. One thing people would naturally do is they would try to give Patrick a lot of the jokes because he’s the dumb character, and so that was something Steve always stressed, and I tried to do it on the movie was try not to give Patrick the first joke. Let’s try to give SpongeBob the joke, even though he’s the main character. The main character can tend to be a little straighter, but let’s try to make SpongeBob funny. Let’s make SpongeBob do weird things to keep him the most engaging person on the screen. A lot of this stuff sounds like it’s kind of obvious, but when you’re in the process of it, you tend to kind of protect your main character and not have them make mistakes or have them do dumb things, and that’s not what we want to do with SpongeBob.

Image via Nickelodeon

For fans of SpongeBob, what are you excited for fans to experience with the movie? What do you want to tell people about it? DRYMON: I feel like this is a movie you come to where you really can laugh, and you can enjoy it. You can go with your family, go with your friends. What we stressed was just the fun and the silliness. It’s just a fun, kind of silly, dumb adventure. A lot of jokes. I’m hoping that people laugh all the way through it. There are big cinematic moments in it, which are nice. In the long form, you can do things that are bigger than you can do in a short. Still, we’re taking moments, taking time for SpongeBob and Patrick to do their silly stuff within this big adventure. Where are you in the production process? Because it comes out at the end of the year. DRYMON: We’re done! We’re finished. Oh, so the movie’s done-done? DRYMON: Done-done. We did the final mix for the video, which is the last thing you do, the video portion of it if it appears on streaming or something. So that was done the Wednesday before last week, before we left. That has to be an amazing feeling. DRYMON: Yeah. Making a movie is so busy, busy, busy, fast, and hustle, hustle, hustle, and then it’s over. It’s very anticlimactic. You’re done, and the room’s kind of empty, and there’s nobody there. There’s no champagne pops or anything.
Mark Hamill Taps Into His Inner Silent Movie Star for ‘The Spongebob Movie’

“Think about Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin.”

Custom Image by Nimesh Niyomal Perera

One of the things that a lot of people are excited about is seeing Mark Hamill, and also, the movie does some live action. Talk a little bit about the live-action aspect of the movie, and also getting to have Mark Hamill. How much did you get to geek out with him? DRYMON: I was trying to be professional at all times with Mark, but it was definitely fun. I was probably in third grade when Star Wars came out, so I grew up a big Star Wars person. I’d worked with him once before on another show, so I had a little experience with him. But he is just the sweetest. He’s the nicest, sweetest guy, and super easy to work with. He just wants to know what you want, and then he can turn and become that villain. He plays those villains so well. He’s got, like, a basement that he goes to for that voice. His natural voice seems much higher, and he goes down to this really craggy monster. He can be very intimidating, and then he’s just like, “Hows that?” [Laughs] On stage, it was super fun because he dressed up as the Dutchman. He just looks completely different. The Dutchman’s got this long hair, beard, a big nose, a bald head. Most of my time I spent with Mark was like that, in this little bald-guy version. Then I remember seeing him for the later records, and he had a full head of hair and his regular face. Anyway, he’s a natural comedian. We were doing a lot of very comedic, almost silent movie acting style for takes and looks, and the way he would walk, and these different things. I just said to him, “Think about Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin.” He just nailed it. He would have these funny looks, funny takes, his silhouettes would be really great. I asked him, “Have you ever done this before?” He was like, “No, this is my first time acting like this with this style.” I was like, “How do you know how to do that then?” He said, “I love watching them.” So he’s a big, big fan of classic comedy. It was a great experience. Super fun. I’m a huge fan, and he’s always such a nice guy. DRYMON: Oh, he’s a sweet guy. He’s really good buddies with Tom Kenny, who plays SpongeBob. Tom was helping me do the voice direction, and so the first time we all got there, we just ended up talking about The Kinks. Mark will just goes right into these old stories. He’s got a million stories. He’ll tell Star Wars stories, The Empire Strikes Back stories. He’s just happy to talk, you know?

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I’ve been asking a lot of people in the world of animation this question. You know how video games like The Last of Us would be remastered? It’s the original story, but it’s all modern video game effects. What are your thoughts on a movie, hypothetically a Ratatouille or an older movie that was done with CGI, and remastering it with modern VFX, where it’s the exact same movie, but it has modern animation? What are your thoughts on this? Are you completely against it? Is the idea appealing? DRYMON: A good example of that to me was Star Trek, or even Star Wars, where they took those old shows and they got rid of the old effects and they added a new layer of effects. I understand why you would do that; newer audiences don’t find the kitsch of that so attractive or appealing, so if you do those things to try to modernize it, as long as the old one exists, as the viewer, I’d like to have the choice of what I would like to watch. My feeling is — and I’m using Ratatouille as an example — Ratatouille will always exist, but the idea of Ratatouille remastered means you have modern animation and then you’re putting it back in theaters for a new generation. DRYMON: I don’t have any problem with that, as long as you have the old. Like you said, it always exists, so I don’t care as long I can watch what I want to watch the way I want to watch it. Star Wars is a good example. They redid those Star Wars, but now you can’t get the original. That’s the part where it’s like, “Well, I wish I could watch it the way I like to watch it.”

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What are you thinking about doing next? DRYMON: I’d love to do another SpongeBob. It was super fun to go back to those characters, and it was really fun working with the original cast. I’ve known all those guys for so long, and just spending so much time with them in the recording studio was super fun. Working with the crew, I was able to find some of the older guys from way back when. I hired some new people. So, I feel like we’ve got a nice group together, and really hit our stride, you know? Everybody just got really on board and understood it, and I was starting to hear other people giving direction to the new people the way I would want to give direction, so I felt like we really clicked. So, it would be nice to do another one. That would be my number one choice. But after that, it’s a tough time now, you know? It’s a very tough time. DRYMON: You have to keep your options open. I like doing story. I like doing storyboards. That’s where I come from, writing jokes and things like that, so I wouldn’t mind doing that for a little bit. I like working with people I like, just friends. I’ve gotten calls from friends for different projects, so I think, probably between now and the new year’ll be hanging out, seeing what’s happening, seeing what’s going. Then, hopefully by the new year, there’ll be something to dive back into. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants makes waves in theaters on December 19.

The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants

Release Date

December 17, 2025

Director

Derek Drymon

Writers

Matt Lieberman

Producers

Aaron Dem, Lisa Stewart, Pam Brady, Vincent Waller

Tom Kenny

SpongeBob Squarepants (voice)

Rodger Bumpass

Squidward (voice)

Bill Fagerbakke

Patrick Star (voice)