Word: sharked
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...good-intentioned as they may be, the most frustrating aspect of this narrative trope is the suffocating bathing of allegory many of these characters receive. The most recent example of this problematic trend is Dreamworks’ Shark Tale, which has a prominent character so metaphorically drenched in sub-meaning that it pinpoints with accidental exactness what is wrong with the contemporary Hollywood political praxis...
...best boy? Maybe we have. Maybe it's time. I mean, if there's one thing that holds cinema back from being a 21st century art form, it's people. So let's go with pixels. They're cuter, cheaper, better behaved. They can simulate funny sea creatures (Shark Tale), re-create 1939 Manhattan or Shangri-La (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), visualize a future dystopia (Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence) with a wave of a wand, the click of a mouse...
...your Uncle Walt's cartoons, the creaky two-dimensional kind with hand-made drawings and singing dwarfs and teapots. Even the most familiar looking of our new trio--Shark Tale, from the people responsible for the Shrek megahits--is in the computer-generated mode. Another DreamWorks cartoon that eerily resembles the work of its competitor Pixar (Antz to match A Bug's Life, Shrek to counter Monsters Inc.), this one goes underwater, as Pixar's Finding Nemo did, but with a more urban-contemporary tilt and much less craft and heart...
Oscar the fish (voiced by Will Smith) is a little dude with a big mouth who becomes a hero under false pretenses, by saying he slew a shark--a shark who happens to be the son of Don Lino (Robert De Niro), the sea's feared codfather. To propel the plot, Don Lino's sissy son Lenny (Jack Black) befriends Oscar and his adoring friend Angie (Renée Zellweger). At its jauntiest, as when it shows Oscar at work in a whale car wash, Shark Tale is the Jaws that refreshes, but too often it just piles on the gags...
...Captain is every bit as much an animated film as Shark Tale. Kerry Conran's script has a plot lifted and sifted from lots of '30s films--The Wizard of Oz, Lost Horizon and a dozen sassy newspaper comedies. But the technique is the star here: Conran's devising of a Deco-meets-delirium universe that he projected onto a blue screen, in front of which the game, clueless stars--Jude Law as the intrepid flyboy, Gwyneth Paltrow as a plucky news gal--recited their lines...