Animated Mob Comedy Shark Tale Casts Will Smith as a Fish, Puts Him in Debt to a Shark

Shark Tale opens with a promise it cannot keep. The tagline sells a great white lie, and the movie delivers a small one. A bluestreak cleaner wrasse talks his way into fame, a shark with a secret helps him hold the story together, and ninety minutes later nothing much has been said about either of them.

Trailer, via YouTube Movies.

Oscar, the Whale Wash, and a Pearl

The setup is thin but workable. Oscar works at the Whale Wash, owes money to its owner, a pufferfish named Mr. Sykes, and dreams of being rich and famous instead. His best friend Angie, an angelfish with a secret crush on him, hands over a pearl from her grandmother so he can pay the debt. He takes the money to a seahorse race instead, hears the race is rigged, and bets everything on a seahorse called Lucky Day.

Lucky Day trips short of the finish line. The race was rigged against him. Sykes loses his temper and orders his two jellyfish henchmen, Ernie and Bernie, to punish Oscar by banishing him from the reef. It is a clean enough engine for a comedy, and the movie spends its first act building it.

Then Frankie dies. An anchor falls on his neck while he charges at Oscar. Lenny, who had just freed Oscar and told him to run, blames himself and leaves. Oscar takes credit for the kill and becomes the Sharkslayer.

That is the whole movie in one beat, and it is the beat Shark Tale never earns.

Will Smith, Robert De Niro, and a Voice Cast Doing Very Little

The cast list is the best thing about Shark Tale. Will Smith voices Oscar. Robert De Niro voices Don Lino, the shark mob boss who dislikes that his younger son is a vegetarian and orders his older son to mentor him. Renée Zellweger is Angie. Jack Black is Lenny. Angelina Jolie is Lola, the redhead gold digger lionfish who seduces Oscar at the track. Martin Scorsese is Sykes. Ziggy Marley is Ernie. Doug E. Doug is Bernie. Michael Imperioli is Frankie. Vincent Pastore is Luca. Peter Falk is Don Feinberg.

That is a murderers’ row of voice talent, and the movie gives almost none of it a scene worth the fee. Scorsese gets the best material as a pufferfish with a temper, and even he is mostly shouting about money. De Niro plays a mob boss again, and the joke is that he is a shark. That is the joke. It does not get better than that.

A Vegetarian Shark and a Lie That Runs Out of Road

Lenny is the only idea in Shark Tale with any life in it. A great white who will not eat meat, cast out by his own father, hiding with the one fish who needs him to stay hidden. The friendship between Oscar and Lenny is the movie’s actual subject, and it is the part that works least, because the script keeps interrupting it to service the lie.

The lie is the problem. Oscar’s fame depends on a death he did not cause, and the movie knows this, but it never makes him pay for it in any way that costs him something. He rises. He becomes the Sharkslayer. The reef treats him as a hero. When the truth finally comes due, the movie resolves it in a few minutes and moves on to the next set piece.

There is no weight to any of it. Oscar is lonely at the start and famous in the middle, and the two states do not feel connected to each other.

The Southside Reef and the Jokes That Miss

The Southside Reef is a busy, colorful, crowded place, and it is busy, colorful and crowded in the way animated underwater movies of the era were. The character design leans hard on caricature. The sharks are broad. The jellyfish are broad. Lola is a shape more than a character.

The movie’s other problem is its jokes. They are pitched at adults who will get the references and at children who will get the colors, and they land for neither. The Italian-American mob material drew criticism from advocacy groups, and watching it now, the criticism holds up. The film treats ethnicity as a costume, and it does not have a second idea underneath.

What Shark Tale Gets Right, and What It Costs

The movie is ninety minutes long, which is the correct length for what it is, and it moves. There is no dead air. For a family audience in 2004, that was enough to sell tickets, and it did. It grossed $375 million worldwide against a $75 million budget and finished as the ninth-highest-grossing film of 2004. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 10, 2004, and was theatrically released in the United States on October 1. It was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 77th Academy Awards.

None of that makes it good. It makes it successful.

The ranking of what actually works here is short and clear:

1. Scorsese as Sykes, the only performance with real comic timing.
2. Lenny’s vegetarianism, the one premise with an actual idea behind it.
3. The ninety-minute runtime, which keeps the whole thing from becoming a chore.
4. The voice cast, which is wasted but at least is a voice cast.
5. The lie itself, which is a fine engine and a poor destination.

The movie’s biggest failure is that it never decides what it is about. It wants to be a mob comedy, a friendship story and a satire of celebrity, and it commits to none of them. Oscar’s arc is a straight line. Lenny’s arc is a straight line. Angie exists to be patient. Lola exists to be a warning. Don Lino exists to be a threat until he is not.

The Verdict on Shark Tale

Shark Tale is a 2004 animated comedy that did exactly what it needed to do at the box office and almost nothing it needed to do as a film. It has a strong cast, a serviceable premise and a runtime that never tests your patience. It also has a script that treats its own best idea as a side plot and its worst idea as the main event.

The mixed reviews at the time were right. The advocacy criticism was right. The Academy nomination was generous. What Shark Tale leaves behind is a tagline, a cast list and a shark who would not eat a fish, which is more than most animated films of its year can claim and less than its budget should have bought.

KEY FACTS
– Title: Shark Tale
– Year: 2004
– Directors: Vicky Jenson, Bibo Bergeron, Rob Letterman
– Runtime: 90 minutes
– Budget: $75 million
– Worldwide gross: $375 million
– Venice premiere: September 10, 2004
– US release: October 1, 2004
– Metacritic: 48/100
– Score: 4.8 of 10

2004 movies · DreamWorks Animation · movie review · Robert De Niro · Shark Tale · Will Smith