On our way to a screening of Shark Tale, my daughter and I fell into a discussion of Finding Nemo, a movie she has seen several dozen times. The subject came up naturally enough, since the movie we were about to see, which opens nationwide today, is DreamWorks's attempt to follow Disney and Pixar into the lucrative and technologically demanding world of underwater computer-generated 3-D animation. In anticipation of the novel delights of Shark Tale, my daughter was happy to revise her earlier high opinion of Nemo. "It's about a fish who gets lost," she said with a shrug. "That's not really very interesting."
As if on guard against such jadedness, the makers of Shark Tale have ensured that their movie is about as many things as possible, including a fish who gets lost, though not quite in the way that Nemo did. The busy story, in any case, with its predictable messages -- Be who you are! Don't forget where you came from! Fish are friends, not food! -- is secondary to the packaging, a bright, hectic swirl of easy jokes and accessible pop-culture allusions.
There are cheerful quasi-ethnic stereotypes -- jellyfish Rastafarians, shark Mafiosi, aquatic ghetto kids with cans of spray paint -- that are technically insulated against offensiveness because, well, they're all fish. There are movie-star voices galore -- Robert De Niro, Will Smith, Renee Zellweger, Jack Black, Angelina Jolie -- and even, more unusually, a recognizable movie-director voice and caricature. I'm relieved (and maybe just a tiny bit disappointed) to report that when Sykes, a fast-talking blowfish with bushy eyebrows, appeared on screen, my daughter, who is 5, did not lean over and whisper, "Hey, isn't that Martin Scorsese?"
But of course Scorsese was not there for her benefit. Like the Shrek pictures, also from DreamWorks, Shark Tale lobs a barrage of movie and television references over the heads of the children in the audience and into the faces of their parents. Some of these are visual, like Sykes' resemblance to the auteur reading his lines, while others pop up on the soundtrack, which quotes the scores from The Godfather, Car Wash and, of course, Jaws. For the finale, fishy likenesses of Christina Aguilera and Missy Elliott strut and prance while the real-life divas sing us through the closing credits.
Smith, as charming with fins and scales as he is in the flesh, plays Oscar, a feckless fish who works at Sykes's whale wash. Zellweger is the receptionist, Angie. She is madly in love with Oscar, who regards her, to her chagrin, as his best pal and nothing more. Meanwhile, Don Lino (De Niro), the capo of the local shark mob, is having trouble with his younger son, Lenny (Black), a sensitive guy who can't stomach either his family business or the predatory ways of his species.
The plots converge when Lenny's brother, who is about to make a snack out of Oscar, smashes into an anchor. Oscar becomes a local celebrity -- the Shark Slayer -- while Lenny's identity crisis becomes even more acute. A further complication arrives in the slinky form of Lola (Jolie), a gold-digging fish fatale who steals Oscar away from loyal, good-hearted Angie. It all ends pretty much the way you expect it will.
There are some inspired scenic touches -- a seahorse racetrack, Sykes's whale wash -- but the undersea environment lacks the sublimity and detail of Nemo. The fish faces, especially in kisses and close-ups, are more clammy than cute, though the sharks have a doughy integrity and some of the minor players, like Don Lino's octopus consigliere and a plate of terrified shrimp cocktail, are cleverly rendered. All in all, Shark Tale is reasonably good fun, even if, in the end, it's not really very interesting.
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