Shark Tale

Belly up: Shark Tale is computer animation's first dud

By Mike Prevatt

There's a scene in Shark Tale that underscores what separates the old animated classics and the current crop of feature-length cartoons. Oscar, a fish voiced by Will Smith, indulges in a hammy moment by breaking into a sideways dance that rapper MC Hammer popularized in 1990. Now, in features like Disney's Pinocchio and Alice in Wonderland, the writers rarely, if ever, used humor rooted in a particular time or culture, and that is why those movies have remained timeless. But Dreamworks can't resist such generation-specific references with Shark Tale, and thus it already feels dated. I mean, how many 8-year-olds out there have even heard of MC Hammer?

Sadly, that's not the most egregious shortcoming for this computer-animated flick, which has the unfortunate position of following last summer's aquatic blockbuster, Disney/Pixar's Finding Nemo. That movie had a surplus of charm and visual innovation. Shark Tale has neither. Worse, in a time when computer animation flicks, from Toy Story to Shrek, have raised the standards of family-geared entertainment, Shark Tale is just plain lazy, from its derivative premise and unimaginative aesthetic to its witless gags and one-dimensional characterizations.

The film essentially pits Oscar and his fellow fish against a family of Mafia-like sharks, and this opens the stereotype floodgates within seconds of the film's beginning. The superficial Oscar is obsessed with the bling-bling lifestyle. The "don" of the sharks (Robert De Niro) is out for blood following the death of one of his sons (which Oscar takes credit for). His other son, the aggression-challenged Lenny (Jack Black, at his most underwhelming), is all but labeled a pansy. Crossdressers and Rastafarians are insultingly portrayed as well.

Yet the movie's writers clearly think they're being clever. When the catchphrase "you had me at hello" surfaces, it's as if the "camera" pans to the fish character played by Renee Zellwegger--who famously coined it in Jerry Maguire--for a reaction. It's the breaking point in the computer animation genre's first certified dud.