Alright so let's get the elephant out of the room. Kamp Koral has been controversial way before it even made its release. And the controversy continued for an obvious reason that Stephen Hillenburg clearly did not want any spin-offs from SpongeBob SquarePants. I know that Nickelodeon had negotiated with Hillenburg before with like the first SpongeBob Movie, but that actually did well and Nickelodeon atleast made sure everyone was keeping SpongeBob true to the heart. Now he did know about this show's production, but nowhere did it say that he had approved of it.
Anyway, since this show just HAD to happen, I want to review why the show itself doesn't work. 2021 has probably been the worst year for Nicktoons. I don't know one good Nicktoon that came out that year, and this is probably the highlight of them all. One reason this show doesn't capture the magic of the original SpongeBob series is because it makes all the characters children. This is like one of those baby spin-offs like Muppet Babies or Madagascar: a Little Wild where they make something for younger audiences to simply be cute and sometimes educational. This ruins the whole point of SpongeBob. We love how the characters seem ageless and the environment they live in is timeless. Here, they are all watered down to younger audiences with younger personalities and gives the series very little to work with. I mean sure, SpongeBob and friends aren't here trying to talk down to the show's audience constantly making lessons and morals, I'll give it that. It still has some of the slapstick charm the original show has, but it's barely entertaining and drags on for way too long. This makes the pacing feel very slow even for just two 11 minute episodes put together, even children can get bored from this easily. Atleast in the modern episodes of the original show, you feel like something happens enough to keep your eyes on the screen. This was also the problem with Sponge on the Run that basically just advertised this series with all the flashback scenes at the camp . The episodes don't have much of a story either as they rely far too heavily on slapstick as they're basically just a series of events that try to be funny, but because of how watered down this show has to be, the jokes never hit.
And of course, this show has a noticeable continuity error just like in Sponge on the Run. SpongeBob met Sandy at Bikini Bottom in the original series when they were older, not at a camping event as children. I get that SpongeBob is flawed with continuity in general, but literally something against how the characters meet doesn't pull through. And yes I've seen how Sandy made a machine to communicate with her future self, but this just felt like a lazy way to quickly fix the issue before more people notice it.
The animation also looks flawed, I will say that this isn't the worst CGI depiction of SpongeBob and the others. But because the animators are on a television budget, they can barely translate the animation style from 2D into 3D with good quality. SpongeBob actually looked good in CGI from movie appearances, but for a show, it barely looks right. The designs do capture the expressions nicely, but after a while they became uncanny to look at in such smooshed models. The backgrounds are also not rendered very well and lack detail like in the original show. And there is very little lighting that makes some scenes look like they were green-screened. The CGI just doesn't fit well with these 2D characters on a smaller budget.
Also this might not be as necessary to point out, but none of the voices sound young like they did in the scenes from Sponge on the Run. They all just sound grown up exactly like they sound in the original show which makes little to no sense if their voices were depicted to sound younger originally.
Anyway, this is the result of a SpongeBob spin-off and why Hillenburg wouldn't have wanted this to happen. And sadly it fails to redeem SpongeBob and the others as who we love.
