Shark Tale
Rental with Snacks
Dreamworks and Disney and Warner Brothers and Pixar, as animation
studios, all have sought to find their own voice in an industry only
recently beginning to be taken as seriously as the work deserves.
Obviously, of these two groups, Disney and Warner are the hand-drawn
titans, and Pixar and Dreamworks are the computer animated sovereigns.
Shark Tale is Dreamworks' latest entry to its spotty but prolific
short history. You might think, oh, it's just another Finding Nemo,
because it's about fish. The good news for Dreamworks is that short
of being set in a reef, the similarities between Oscar's and Marlin's
stories are nil. The good news for Pixar is that they are in no
danger of being overcome by Dreamworks' quality. I hate to deride
any work in this genre - it is a long, painful labor of love over
many years, and the results can be dismissed in an instant. It
always starts with the writing, and there is where Dreamworks fails
its hard working animators.
Oscar (voiced by Will Smith) is a high-dreaming, but not
hard-working, fish who happens to get entangled in the life of a
powerfully connected vegetarian shark (an unrecognizable Jack Black).
The reef is a punny, barnacled New York City, its transmogrification
more like Shrek's faux Hollywood than Osmosis Jone's pun-centered
alternate universe. While you're waiting for something funny to come
out of the action or dialogue, you can enjoy funny visual gags. The
fish are highly anthropomorphized, sass-talking creatures with a
penchant for the latest commercial successes. The main story is
amusing enough, but nothing to write home about.
The better treats are the supporting characters and the throwaway
visual jokes. I don't mean "Gup" as a pun for the Gap. I laughed
harder at an octopus pouring tea - underwater, with all that implies
- than at any of the jokes they told me to laugh at. I felt pretty
much the same as in the Shrek sequel - like I was being told "this is
funny" and that I was just supposed to believe it. However, anything
having to do with the inherent difficulties of our human lives being
conducted underwater (tea, paint, fire hydrants) was funny.
Supporting characters Leno (Robert DeNiro) and Sykes (Martin
Scorcese) were great. These actors were really having fun, not
clocking a paycheck. Don't get me wrong, I like Smith and Black, but
these dynamic performers were trapped by their roles (as were the
dames), whereas Deniro and Scorcese were liberated by them.
The voice casting overall was great. Renee Zellweger sounds like a
girl next door and Angelina Jolie sounds like a social climbing vamp.
Go figure. The jellyfish thugs assayed by Doug E. Doug and, yes,
Ziggy freaking Marley) were as cool to look at as to listen to
bickering.
This Shark Tale, however, stripped to the bone, is like 100 other
stories just like it, with the corporate stench of "like this or
else" that has permeated Dreamworks' animation since after Prince of
Egypt. I enjoyed it on a simple level, my companion loved it, and it
was a diverting little movie. It's no Finding Nemo, with its
tumbling, biology-derived humor, genuine characterizations, and
mature-yet-accessible-to-kids writing. Shark Tale has hip hop and
funk numbers, with the older fish dancing as painfully fake as their
real life bodies would, crass commercialism, and forgettable kid
characters in a movie supposedly written for them. Nemo was a cool,
gutsy kid with resources and real child anxieties, vulnerability, and
heroism. It's not fair to compare, but it can't be helped, what with
the fish and all. The animation is good, the performances are good,
but it's between Nemo and this that we can easily draw the
distinction between movie and classic. It's mostly worth seeing, but
it's disposable.
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
These reviews (c) 2004 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to
forward but credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. You can
check out previous reviews at:
http://www.cinerina.com and http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the
Online Film Critics Society
http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/listing.hsbr - Hollywood Stock
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========== X-RAMR-ID: 38755 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1325938 X-RT-TitleID: 1136999 X-RT-SourceID: 755 X-RT-AuthorID: 3661 X-RT-RatingText: 3.5/5
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