Shark Tale

Dir: Rob Letterman, Bibo Bergeron, Vicky Jenson

2004

**

DreamWorks Animation's Shark tale became dated pretty much as soon as it was released. It was a huge hit of the production company (their 2nd biggest opening at the time) and it is miles ahead of Shrek, it just doesn't look or feel right, and for a kids film it is aimed at the adults just a little too much. The fact it was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars just tells you how bad the year was for animation (or how insular the Academy Awards was/is). Although Shark Tale was produced concurrently with Finding Nemo, it ended up coming out a year and half later, which knocked it out of the water somewhat. DreamWorks Animation's CEO, Jeffrey Katzenberg, defended the film in this respect, saying that "any similarities are mere coincidence. We've been open with the Pixar people so we don't step on each other's toes." I'm pretty sure Pixar weren't at all concerned. The story is fairly derivative and full of way too many pop culture in-jokes that only half the target audience would get. I had no problem with animated characters resembling their given voice actor until I saw Shark Tale, but after watching I've become a strict advocate that the characters should be their own creation, rather than adopting any type of similarity with their voice actor. It's horrible. The Shark Slayer of the film is voiced by Will Smith and is basically a version of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Robert DeNiro is every gangster his ever played before, Angelina Jolie is the 'femme fatale' the media had painted her as (why would she agree to that?) and Renée Zellweger was Dorothy Boyd from Jerry Maguire. Only Jack Black's character Lenny can't be attached to a previous role of his but Lenny is the character I had the biggest problem with. Lenny comes out as a vegetarian shark, a funny idea that has possibilities. The problem is, the strong underlining assumption is that Lenny is in fact gay, rather than a non-meat eater. He acts camp and has many of Hollywood's homosexual stereotypes about him, it's handed poorly and I don't believe any denial that that isn't what was going on and that the film makers hadn't noticed similarities. The animation is poor, the idea is half-hearted and messy and there is very little warmth to be had. Apart from the fact they had Martin Scorsese do the voice of one of the main characters, I wasn't impressed. They also got the anthropomorphism all wrong, Finding Nemo and Pixar in general knew how their characters should move etc but they didn't give them human objects to interact with, a stingray acted as a bus, rather than them having a real bus. The fish didn't have cameras, television sets and other objects that just make no sense. Poor story and poor visuals don't make for a great animation, animation has come leaps and bounds since 2004 but most animations released before this were far superior.