Pinreel Inc.
The title “Go Fetch!” carved in craggy blue and pink rock on the dark seafloor, bubbles drifting up
All work

SpongeBob SquarePants · Season 16

“Go Fetch!”

SpongeBob throws Gary’s ball too far, straight into the Mariana Trench. Down there it is dark, it is deep, and nearly everything has teeth. Pinreel made the series’ first CG episode in house, from first storyboard to final delivery.

Watch on YouTube
Network
Nickelodeon
Premiere
October 2025
Format
6-minute CG episode
Adam
Writer, director, executive producer, production designer
Scale
80+ shots, about 20 animators, about a year
Festival
Annecy 2026, official selection
SpongeBob rides a glowing saucer past a giant fanged anglerfish through a field of spiky sea mines

“My goal was to honor the show in a way that felt official, not like a fan-made experiment or quirky art project.”

Adam Paloian, interviewed by 80 Level, December 2025

The approach

Adam set out to keep everything that makes SpongeBob work, simple stories and cartoony acting, and rebuild the look from the ground up: 2D design principles, the handmade texture of stop-motion, the composition and light of matte paintings, and the real depth of a CG camera.

Before production he wrote an art direction bible covering set assembly, character surfacing, color keys and animation design to camera. It became the blueprint every artist was onboarded with.

SpongeBob squashed flat like an accordion, eyes bulging, ball in hand Poster: a tiny delighted SpongeBob sits on a mountain of skulls beneath huge glowing eyes
Squash and stretch, sculpted: cartoon deformations rebuilt as CG models. Right, the episode poster.
SpongeBob and Gary, cheerful, in a sunny meadow of coral flowers The same framing in the dark trench: SpongeBob battered with a black eye, Gary beside him
Same framing, top of the episode and the bottom of the trench.
Baby Gary with huge eyes on a blanket next to his food bowl and a teddy bear SpongeBob seen through the translucent body of a giant glowing fish that has swallowed him Bessy the anglerfish, mouth open, towering over a tiny SpongeBob

Color keys

Painted over Adam’s boards by Nick Jennings to set the light and mood of each sequence before anything was built in CG.

Color key: SpongeBob and Gary cower before rocks shaped like screaming faces Color key: SpongeBob triumphant on a pile of skulls, holding the ball Color key: a huge dark anglerfish looms over SpongeBob on the skull pile Color key: the same anglerfish shot lit blood red Color key: SpongeBob trapped in the glass head of a barreleye fish Color key: the barreleye's eyes blaze like headlights Color key panorama: SpongeBob runs through a murky green valley of spires Color key: SpongeBob in a saucer flees a fanged fish among chained sea mines Color key: a giant fish skeleton's jaws over a fleeing SpongeBob Color key: rainbow vents and a sunken ship on a blue alien seafloor Color key: SpongeBob and Gary in a foggy graveyard of bones Color key: the barreleye swims off through a dark orange canyon Color key: a traffic-light anglerfish hovers over fish walking on stilt fins
Next project Tenacious D, “Video Games”