With its boundless affection for fart jokes and tortured puns, Bob’s Burgers’s sense of humor has always been gleefully juvenile. But it’s the richly textured and deeply silly family dynamic at its heart that’s kept the show going for 12 seasons and counting. Less quarrelsome and caricatured than the Simpsons, nowhere near as repressed as the Hills, and without the off-putting cynicism of the Griffins, the Belchers share a goofy yet authentically loving relationship that never comes off as cloying or phony.
Bob’s Burgers has long offered one of TV’s more refreshingly honest portrayals of familial intimacy, capturing the way a close-knit familial unit can seem bizarre, inappropriate, and, of course, hilarious to an outsider. And in translating this comfy family dynamic to the big screen, series creator Loren Bouchard, working with co-director Bernard Derriman and co-writer Nora Smith, has opted not to reimagine the Belchers but rather to reintroduce them.
The Bob’s Burgers Movie strikes a delicate balance, preserving the Belchers’ quirky core while opening their world up enough to appeal to new viewers. The film’s plot, only slightly more extravagant than your typical episode of Bob’s Burgers, finds Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) and Linda (John Roberts) struggling to pay back a business loan to the bank, which threatens to repossess their burger shop if payment isn’t received in a week’s time. Meeting that deadline is complicated by a giant sinkhole that opens up right in front of their restaurant, as well as the skeleton of a murdered carny named Cotton Candy Dan that’s buried inside.
Meanwhile, each of the Belcher kids deals with an archetypal dilemma: Gene (Eugene Mirman) vies to earn a spot for his band, the Itty Bitty Ditty Committee, in a festival at the Wonder Wharf; Tina (Dan Mintz) anxiously hopes that Jimmy Pesto Jr. (Benjamin) will agree to be her “summer boyfriend”; and Louise (Kristen Schaal)—quietly the show’s sensitive, beating heart—deals with feelings of inadequacy surrounding her pink bunny-eared hat.
Bouchard and Smith’s script at times turns to predictable sitcom plotting, ping-ponging between clear “A” and “B” plots as the kids investigate Cotton Candy Dan’s death while their parents attempt to keep Bob’s Burgers afloat by wheeling around a “Mobile Bob’s Burger Mobile” cobbled together for them by their restaurant’s obsequious number one customer, Teddy (Larry Murphy). But The Bob’s Burgers Movie pulls off the tricky task of expanding the scope of the show enough so that it feels cinematic without losing the source material’s fundamentally playful spirit. Even when it indulges in lavish musical numbers and mock-action-movie spectacles, the film retains the loose, improvisatory delivery of the show.
Bouchard and company ensure that most of the show’s colorful cast of minor characters make an appearance, though only Teddy—by this point, a kind of honorary sixth member of the Belcher clan—and the grandiloquent Fischoeder clan rate much more than a cameo. Sadly, one of this writer’s personal favorites, Linda’s Eeyore-like cat-lady sister, Gail, is missing completely, while Bob’s across-the-street archnemesis, Jimmy Pesto, appears in only a short and conspicuously silent cameo, his lines no doubt cut due to voice actor Jay Johnston having been blacklisted by Fox for his involvement in the January 6th riot.
While the effort to pack in as many side characters as possible might viewed as fan service, the quick-hit jokes from the show’s rich cast of oddballs nevertheless serves to suggest a vibrant world outside of the Belchers. Unlike its closest cinematic forebear, The Simpsons Movie, The Bob’s Burgers Movie doesn’t use the wider canvas of a full-length movie to paint a broad satirical portrait of an entire community but rather keeps its focus on the family at its heart.
If The Simpsons uses its central brood to interrogate the tensions and contradictions of the American nuclear family, Bob’s Burgers has always been primarily interested in the weird internal logic that makes a household tick. The Belchers are weird, but they’re not dysfunctional, a point that Bouchard and company highlight by contrasting them with the wealthy, backstabbing Fischoeders. When set beside the seething, money-obsessed resentments of Calvin (Kevin Kline), Felix (Zach Galiafinakis), and Grover (David Wain), the fondness that the Belchers feel for one another couldn’t be any more evident. They may be broke, anxious, and a little bit crazy, but at least the Belchers have each other.
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