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I'm not saying that DreamWorks' latest big budget, computer- animated feature should be sliced up and served as sushi, but it is a disappointment considering its star appeal.
Among the name actors who lend facial features and mannerisms to the characters as well as voices are Will Smith, Renee Zellweger, Angelina Jolie, Jack Black, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Michael Imperioli, Vincent Pastore, Peter Falk, Ziggy Marley and Doug E. Doug.
They play various tropical fish, great white sharks, jellyfish, an octopus and other critters who live on a thriving reef city and inside a nearby rusting sunken ship.
Of course, this is an anthropomorphic tale, meaning that they are all given human traits by the animators under co-directors Vicky Jenson and Eric (Bibo) Bergeron (with help from another co-director, Rob Letterman).
The characters are also thrown into a genre pool. The movie spoofs Mafia flicks, including The Godfather, with scattered references to other films and styles as divergent as film noir (Jolie's femme fatale, a la Lauren Bacall in To Have And Have Not), science-fiction (Bladerunner) and even ghetto musical comedies (Car Wash).
Shark Tale (formerly Sharkslayer) is the story of how an anti-hero rogue fish named Oscar (voiced by Smith) pretends to be a shark slayer after a freak accident involving a young great white shark (Imperioli) and a boat anchor.
Oscar's newfound fame allows him to leave his job as a tongue scrubber at the drive-through whale-wash. And it means he leaves behind the good girl Angie Angel Fish (Zellweger) to flirt with the vampish Lola Dragon Fish (Jolie).
Meanwhile, an intersecting plot concerns how the great white shark mob don (De Niro) is out for revenge because Oscar's supposed victim was his killer number one son. In between them is the boss's other son Lenny (Black), a vegetarian fish-hugger who befriends Oscar and Angie.
As bizarre as it sounds, this plot is actually formulaic and predictable in both its outcome and its tidy little moral lesson.
That would be okay if it were also consistently funny.
Nope, glub, glub, glub! Jokes fall flat, or get tired quickly and seem so strained that adults might get bored.
That's a big problem, and not just for the anti-defamation leagues who find fault with Italian-American gangster images, especially from De Niro. (Jamaicans might also cringe when they see what Marley and Doug do to Rastafarians).
But I don't think it's worth filleting a fish comedy for racial stereotypes, not when they are as tame as in this one. The real crusher in Shark Tale is its simplicity and superficiality.
Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., Shrek, the Toy Story movies and other great animated flicks work on multiple levels, simultaneously pleasing and provoking adults and children.
Shark Tale, despite how flashy it looks in design, is too unsophisticated.
It is just a kiddie cartoon -- but it also may have too many old movie genre references to appeal as fully to those kiddies as it needs to. This sucker fish could drown.
(This film is rated G)