Loren Bouchard and Bernard Derriman bring the Belchers to the big screen with shadows, songs and a murder, and keep them exactly the size they were. It is warm, funny and slight, and the mystery is the least interesting thing in it.
The Belchers have been on American television for more than a decade, and The Bob’s Burgers Movie does what most television films do: it takes a week in the life of a sitcom, stretches it to 102 minutes, adds a body, and hopes nobody minds. We did not mind. Loren Bouchard and Bernard Derriman direct, Bouchard and Nora Smith write, and the result is good-natured, funny in the corners and happy to be small. If you like the family you will like this. If you have never met them it is a fair introduction and no more.
The set-up is a bank loan due in seven days and a sinkhole that opens in front of the restaurant, which is the series’ idea of a disaster. There is a skeleton at the bottom of the hole. Sgt. Bosco (Gary Cole) arrests the landlord, Calvin Fischoeder (Kevin Kline), and Louise (Kristen Schaal), smarting from being called a baby at school, decides to find the real killer. Tina (Dan Mintz) wants Jimmy Jr. as a summer boyfriend. Gene (Eugene Mirman) wants his band on the wharf stage. Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) wants to sell enough burgers to keep the lights on, and Linda (John Roberts) will dress as one if that helps.
The animation has been given what the series never had, which is light. Faces have shadows under the chins, the sea moves, lamps throw pools across the floor of the restaurant at night. Ruben Hickman’s production design keeps the town the same width as the television one but lets Wonder Wharf go dark and sodium-orange for a chase through the bumper cars that is the best-staged thing in the film. Tim Davies’s music carries the songs, which are the series’ strength and are given more room here: the opening number about summer sets out everybody’s wants in three minutes, and is better than most of the dialogue scenes that follow. Kris Fitzgerald cuts at the show’s speed, with jokes hidden in the edges of frames and on shop signs, and the pace holds for about an hour.
We laughed hardest at Linda outside the courthouse in a burger costume, trying to drum up trade from people who have come to watch a man be arraigned, because Roberts plays her with no shame at all and the drawing lets the costume sag. We were also moved, more than a cartoon about a sandwich has any business moving us, by a short scene of Bob alone in the restaurant after closing, counting what he has not made. Benjamin’s voice does nothing. The new shading does the rest.
The murder is the problem. Felix Fischoeder (Zach Galifianakis) and a cousin, Grover (David Wain), are produced as suspects, the children conduct an investigation that runs on a timetable rather than on curiosity, and the film keeps stopping to tell us who had a motive and when. Louise’s part of this is the only part with any feeling in it. Tina and Gene are left with sketches. By the eighty-minute mark we were restless, because the plot had become the point and the plot was never going to be the point.
Set against other television cartoons that went to the cinema, this is the modest one. The Simpsons Movie and the South Park film both got bigger and ruder for the occasion. Bouchard and Derriman have chosen not to, and we respect it, though it means there is nothing here a very good double episode could not have done. What the cinema adds is the light and the songs and a bumper-car chase. That is a fair return on a ticket for a family, and a thin one for anyone else.
Watch it with children who already know the characters, or alone on a wet afternoon when you want to be in a room with people who like each other. At home it loses almost nothing, which is not quite the compliment it sounds.
