I’ve also wandered why the movie sucked so badly, and I think I’ve come up with an answer. Every animated movie that isn’t about people, including the ones you’ve mentioned, works hard to build a coherent inhuman fantasy world, in a very short while, to tell that movie’s story in. “Shrek”, for example, needs to build characters, believable, consistent, within the framework of the movie, so when that character fights, and falls in love, and gets angry or sad, you can relate to that, even though it’s a big, green, painted troll.
Then comes “Shark Tales”. This movie doesn’t try to build such a fantasy world; instead it copies us, and pasts it underwater. It makes no “sense”, in that special Hollywood kind of sense - the Whale-Wash, the fish standing on their tail-fins, talking like rappers, the fish cops riding inside other fish with sirens. Everything in that movie felt fake to me, because I wasn’t looking at a fish dubbed by Will Smith, I was looking at Will Smith dressed up as fish - which was bad.
If you look at Lion King, or Finding Nemo, or Ice Age, you see animals acting like animals. Sure, they may be gay rhinoceroses or morbid mammoths, but they’re animals. The movie answers the question “What if those animals could talk and think and laugh like humans?” Shark Tales doesn’t do that; instead it tries to translate what is basically a human film, only portrayed by fish. And you can’t do that.
I think that ever since Disney's Aladdin, they tried to make cartoons and animated movies that also target adults. In the later movies they abandoned the idea and went back of making kiddie movies, only with language and jokes kids wouldn't understand...
Every animated movie that isn’t about people, including the ones you’ve mentioned, works hard to build a coherent inhuman fantasy world, in a very short while, to tell that movie’s story in. “Shrek”, for example, needs to build characters, believable, consistent, within the framework of the movie, so when that character fights, and falls in love, and gets angry or sad, you can relate to that, even though it’s a big, green, painted troll.
Then comes “Shark Tales”. This movie doesn’t try to build such a fantasy world; instead it copies us, and pasts it underwater. It makes no “sense”, in that special Hollywood kind of sense - the Whale-Wash, the fish standing on their tail-fins, talking like rappers, the fish cops riding inside other fish with sirens. Everything in that movie felt fake to me, because I wasn’t looking at a fish dubbed by Will Smith, I was looking at Will Smith dressed up as fish - which was bad.
If you look at Lion King, or Finding Nemo, or Ice Age, you see animals acting like animals. Sure, they may be gay rhinoceroses or morbid mammoths, but they’re animals. The movie answers the question “What if those animals could talk and think and laugh like humans?” Shark Tales doesn’t do that; instead it tries to translate what is basically a human film, only portrayed by fish. And you can’t do that.
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I tried to watch shark tales, but stopped after about 10 minutes.
This movie sucks.
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