Editor’s Note: Spoilers ahead
Lies! Betrayal! Car chases! A 2.35:1 aspect ratio! Murder! In making the leap from television to theaters, The Bob’s Burgers Movie incorporates greater stakes than your average episode. The lives and livelihood of the Belcher family are in danger as they try to uncover who put a recently discovered corpse beneath their restaurant, all while trying to make enough money to save it.
Yet, despite these greater stakes, the film doesn’t end with some canon-changing revelation, nor does the spectacle feel like some status quo redefining threat. Unlike, say, The Rugrats Movie, which introduced Tommy’s little brother, or The Simpsons Movie, which sees Springfield itself nearly destroyed by a dome and a bomb, the movie ends with the Belchers just barely scraping by as they always do.
So, how does the film maintain an event status without bringing in an alien invasion? The answer comes in the charm of the show, and the charm of Bob himself (H. Jon Benjamin). He’s perpetually at his wit’s end because he’s perpetually around weirdos, being married to one (Linda, voiced by John Roberts), having sired three (Tina, Gene and Louise, voiced by Dan Mintz, Eugene Mirman, and Kristen Schaal, respectively), and lives in a building run by one (Calvin Fischoeder, voiced by Kevin Kline) in a town full of them. With oddness being their everyday, a bigger budget doesn’t necessitate content you wouldn’t see in an episode.
Instead, the bigger budget gives you more of that content. The previously mentioned car chase doesn’t put the Belchers on some freeway escaping five SUVs, but under a pier in rejected go-karts. The musical sequences don’t consist of flashy spectacle, but illuminate different sides of the Belchers’ world. Carnies are not new to this world, but Carnieopolis is, and what better way to introduce this familiar yet new land by having this band of freaks break out into song?
Unsurprisingly, a character that benefits most from this increased budget is Mr. Fischoeder. Why the infamously nicknamed “Kevin Decline” took a role on an animated Fox sitcom we may never know, but I’m glad he did. Calvin Fischoeder being the richest man in this bizarre town is all the more prevalent in the film, showing us his brother Felix’s (Zach Galifianakis) tree house (literally) on his property and the quasi-steampunk, ocean-themed hideout underneath his amusement park, the Wonder Wharf. He’s an odd fellow, and not particularly gracious or giving, but he’s so much fun to be around, and these new revelations of his everyday oddities only add to his bizarre mystery.
However, what of the Belchers themselves? What new side do we see that’s simultaneously event worthy and doesn’t change the status quo? For starters, the new fangled animation and wider aspect ratio give new life to their classic dynamics. When we get the film’s first wide shot of the restaurant, it feels like you’re seeing everything, the tables, the grill, the antics, and the individual mannerisms for the first time.
Textually, the characters are just as rich. For one, Gene’s imaginative, odd passions are on full display, as he wants to headline a summer concert at the Wonder Wharf. His concern, however, is both preposterous and grave: how does he overcome his anxiety that he’ll be so bad that space robots will destroy humanity because of him? Similarly, Tina’s anxieties are as old as both the show and time itself: she likes Jimmy Jr. (also voiced by H.Jon Benjamin) and doesn’t know if he likes her back. This time, though, there’s particular pressure: it’s a week before summer break, meaning she only has a week to ask him to be her summer boyfriend. It’s easy for her to fantasize the two of them riding off into a purple sunset on the beach, but even the perfect-fantasy Jimmy Jr. can see this isn’t enough for her. She’s been crushing on Jimmy Jr. for years, she needs the real thing, can she finally go for it?
Arguably the simplest but most powerful of these arcs, however, is Louise. Being both the youngest and most articulate of the Belcher kids, she has a rageful wit that complements both. She feels taken less seriously because of her youth, and feels she should be taken the most seriously. She doesn’t take her classmates very seriously, but boy does it grind her gears when they call her the dreaded, B-word.
That’s right, they call her a baby.
Any time this happens, the most articulate Belcher becomes feral. Her primal desire, to be taken seriously and prove how not-scared she is, ultimately kick-starts the main plot into action: she wants to look brave climbing down a dark hole and ends up finding the corpse at the center of this murder mystery, and she encourages her brother and sister to help her find the killer. However, as compelling as all that is, Louise’s arc stands out because it’s the most emotional. It’d be easy to say “beneath all that tough rage is a scared little kid, and that’s okay”, but the film doesn’t necessarily go that route.
Instead, it confronts a lie she’s told herself for years. Louise thinks Bob and Tina made her iconic hat because she was scared to go to her first day of preschool, and so she thinks her bravery has always been a separate part of herself that she has to fight to maintain, not as something intrinsic. When Bob and Tina hear this, they’re baffled. Louise was never scared of preschool. They gave her the hat for two reasons. The first is that it belonged to someone special to their family, someone Louise never got to meet. The second is, she just wanted the hat.
Her silly hat has always been a part of that everyday oddness that permeates Bob’s Burgers, being right at home in a show that has a teenage girl with a “complicated relationship with zombies”. What the film does is isolates the hat (and, by proxy, Louise) out from the rest of oddness, and shows its heart, and how that heart beats through the rest of the show. Louise’s bravery, intelligence and bunny hat were never separate parts of her that she needed to justify or fight to keep for her.
They are her. And when the film ends in essentially the same place it started, there’s no annoyance at repetition, just gladness. Gladness the Belchers are back at home, that they’re all safe, that the restaurant hasn’t closed, and, above all, that we got to spend time in their odd world.
