Behind The Scenes Of ‘Spongebob & Sandy’s Country Christmas’ Stop-Motion Special

From the time Stephen Hillenburg created Spongebob Squarepants, in 1994, the sassy pants-wearing sea sponge has embodied an anything-goes attitude. For Nickelodeon executive producers Marc Ceccarelli and Vincent Waller, Spongebob and other denizens of the underwater town of Bikini Bottom have been a mainstay of boisterous animated fun – for more than 300 episodes, three features, and spin-offs including the recent Netflix film Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie, and now, a new stop-motion holiday special, Spongebob & Sandy’s Country Christmas.

Much of Spongebob’s charm springs from the character’s irreverent humor (voiced by Tom Kenny) and the series’ eclectic use of animated mediums. These have included 2d animation at Nickelodeon Animation Studio in Burbank, California, and Rough Draft Studios in Korea, and oddball bursts of puppetry and stop-motion created at Screen Novelties – co-founded by Mark Caballero, Seamus Walsh, and Chris Finnegan in Los Angeles. “We look for any opportunity we can to work with Screen Novelties,” executive producer Marc Ceccarelli told Cartoon Brew. “We’re always asking, ‘Are they available for this one?’ And since we had done one Christmas special already with them, it seemed like a natural to do another.”

Cartoon Brew spoke with Ceccarelli and Waller about Spongebob’s latest stop-motion sojourn. The musical half-hour, which features the return of Sandy Cheeks (Carolyn Lawrence) and her Southern squirrel family who attempt to save the holiday spirit in Bikini Bottom, debuted this week on Nickelodeon and is currently streaming on Paramount+.

Cartoon Brew: Does Spongebob require a different paradigm in stop motion?

Vincent Waller: Not when we’re writing and storyboarding. The only difference is that we don’t have to take the boards to as finished a level as we do with RDK [Rough Draft Korea]. It’s easier for us, because we just had to focus on getting the story and timing right, and then Screen Novelties took it from there.

How did you choose which characters to feature?

Waller: We’d just done the [Netflix] Sandy movie, and so this was a chance to bring them into the show. Marc had designed all of Sandy’s family, and so we sent Screen Novelties his original designs to interpret with their version.

How detailed did you get in your animatic?

Marc Ceccarelli: Visual humor is a big part of the 2d show. But the animatics come together after we’ve written a script with our writers, and then we give that to our board artists. In this case, as Vincent said, we didn’t go to clean-up, but we did go to ‘plussing’ [building on existing ideas] for tweaks. And then, we went through the animatic to get it to the right length and get all the scenes up. But we trust Screen Novelties so much, we love to let them play. They reboarded some sequences to work in ideas that only they could imagine. For instance, we sent over one song and they came back with a suggestion because it was Sandy’s country Christmas, ‘Could we countrify this song and make it into a square dance?’ We gave them carte blanche. They got with our music guy and worked out a whole new scene where they’re all [mimes square dancing].

Did your voice recordings inform the animatic?

Waller: We do scratch tracks [temporary audio before recording the voice artists]. But it doesn’t matter how long we think we’ll need in the scratch track, the acting always takes longer. That’s because we’re always trying to fit a scene in a box, whereas the actor in the booth is trying to make it seem natural and make it real.

Per Nickelodeon’s statistics, it took three months to build 68 puppets, with more than 300 digitally printed replacement mouths. Were the puppet builds all new?

Waller: Yes. After we sent over Marc’s drawings, Screen Novelties sent us their hand-drawn designs, changing proportions a little. In their version, Mr. Krabs is on the thin side. We thought, ‘Oh, Krabs got some Ozempic!’ The reason for that was the original [portly] Krabs would have put him a little bit too far from others in the crowd shots. So they took some liberties, thinning things up, or changing proportions a little bit.

They captured the feel of Bikini Bottom very well, with flowery shapes floating in the underwater skies. Was that done in-camera?

Ceccarelli: Screen Novelties figured out a way to imitate our skies, and by changing the lighting, they could make it a completely different time of day. They built the sky in behind, and then they changed the lighting, and that changed everything. Whereas we [in 2d] have to make completely new paintings for every hour of the day.

In wide shots, the environments sometimes felt quite toy-like – were those conscious style gags?

Ceccarelli: They had different sizes of character models, depending on the shot. There’s a great shot where we go from a little marionette version of the French Narrator on his island, playing a guitar. And then, when you cut in closer, it’s Vincent in a diving suit on a set that they built at Screen Novelties. They love playing with scale and they use that for humor. Like, going from an obvious marionette to an obvious person – we know that’s not going to fool anybody, so you’re in on the joke.

One of the funniest moments is when Spongebob momentarily becomes a live-action puppet on fire. How did you do that scene?

Waller: We weren’t around when they shot it, but they had a puppet of Spongebob, they stuck a rod up his rear, put sparklers in him, and then filmed him as they spun him. Screen Novelties came up with all those innovations. That’s why we love them.

Andrew Babik is credited as Screen Novelties’ visual effects supervisor. Did he handle the funny Christmas-themed effects, putting diving helmets onto air-breathing characters underwater, and vice versa?

Waller: Yes, and the helmet work is seamless. When Spongebob is wearing the [water-breathing] helmet in Sandy’s dome, you don’t even notice. When she’s pulling Christmas tinsel from his mouth straight through his helmet, it’s just like what we do in 2d, having Spongebob’s arms come up through the helmet. That was the way to do that.

Ceccarelli: That was one of the things that we were most worried about going into this. We hadn’t confronted the helmet issue, the physicality of that, and the fact that all the Cheeks family were going to have to be in scenes where they needed helmets. We were worried because the thought of the animators having to lift helmets off puppets to animate them, and then put the helmets back on for every motion was daunting.

Waller: That and reflections in the helmets are nightmares for stop-motion.

Ceccarelli: Screen Novelties is so good with their compositing. They do a lot of cleanup. The way they do stop-motion animation now, they have their [animation] rigs in shot, and then they go back and rub them out digitally. They already budgeted to do a lot of that, and they have a whole department that handles that in postproduction.

Did you observe animation during the four-month shoot?

Waller: Walking through their studio was like riding a dark ride. We’d go past different curtains that opened to these gorgeous worlds. And though they did use replacement puppets, it was not like they had an unlimited budget, with as many puppets as they needed. Seamus and Mark were sometimes standing outside the curtain, waiting so they could grab Sandy, and run that puppet over to another stage.

Spongebob is always full of surprises, were there scenes that surprised you?

Ceccarelli: Oh, yes! Screen Novelties uses a lot of two-dimensional animation attributes in their work – like squash and stretch, which you don’t usually see in stop motion. A great example of that is the scene when Santa falls through tree branches. For certain frames, to create distortions, they’d very quickly cut a puppet out of foam for the shape of that frame. And then, since they have instant feedback with their digital cameras, they could see if it’s working. That gave it a real improvisational feel.

What makes stop motion special for you?

Waller: Stop motion has always been magic!

Ceccarelli: I think there’s been a resurgence of interest in things that feel handmade. We’ve seen cg pushed to its limit, to the point where there’s almost nothing you can’t imagine in that medium. But it doesn’t always feel like it’s there, in the same way that stop motion does. I’ve noticed some cg-animated features shot on twos so that characters strobe in the same way that they do in stop motion. It’s almost like they knew that was something that they wanted to capture. If animation feels too smooth, it doesn’t feel like people have anything to do with making it.