Dave Made a Maze Is a Whimsical Ode to the Imagination

A cardboard odyssey fit to its name

Gravitas Ventures

Directed by Bill Watterson — not to be confused with the creator of Calvin and Hobbes — Dave Made a Maze is a movie that doesn’t easily lend itself to comparison. Telling the story of a man who constructs an elaborate maze of cardboard that takes on a life of its own, the most direct parallel to point toward is to a 2002 episode of SpongeBob SquarePants titled “The Idiot Box.”

Taking refuge in the cardboard box of a large TV, SpongeBob and his best friend Patrick go on an internal odyssey that includes everything from hikes on frozen peaks and avalanches to elaborate brawls on “Robot Pirate Island.” It’s an episode that blurs the line between fiction and fact as viewers, alongside the ever-pessimistic Squidward, begin to wonder whether everything taking place inside the cardboard box could merely be a product of imagination.

It’s hard to watch this Waterson directorial debut as a former Nickelodeon kid without feeling as though it took some slight inspiration from the famed SpongeBob episode. The quote from early on in the movie “I’ve been in here for three days,” too, appears to pay homage to another scene from season 3.

But while it seems to lightly borrow from the beloved children’s show, it finds more than enough material to justify the oddball cinematic endeavor. As in the SpongeBob episode, it spends the first few minutes simply begging the question of whether viewers will get to see the action inside the cardboard conglomeration at all.

But where the movie diverges from the episode is in the whimsical, inconsequential adventure that takes place within. Occurring almost completely in the confines of a broke-down palace comprised of crafts, it’s a movie that pulls at the strings of the imagination and the inner child alive in all of us.

Once inside the fort of cardboard, it expands in Harry Potter fashion into an M.C. Escher-esque mansion equipped with trapdoors, drawbridges, corridors, murals, and enemies. It’s at once makeshift and tangible, and spellbindingly vast.

So much of the fun in Dave Made a Maze is in the vicarious thrill it offers viewers. The fort Dave creates off-screen before the events of the movie is a dream come true for nearly any child who ever draped a blanket over a couple of chairs and a table before crawling inside.