Word: sharking
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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...
...Shark Tale’s main characters, Lenny (a shark voiced by Jack Black) is so obviously meant to be a doppelganger for a homosexual man that five-year-olds are likely picking up on it well before the scene in which Lenny has a garish performance in full drag as a dolphin (the peaceful, sensitive creatures of the film’s world...
...domineering, alpha-male father (naturally voiced by Robert De Niro), a moronic brother who behaves like a compulsive frat boy and eats anything that moves and in addition he identifies himself as a vegetarian, a lover of all things living, and as “different from other sharks.” Sharks in the world of Shark Tale are the patriarchal keepers of the sea, the top of the food chain. Lenny’s refusal to kill and be “like other sharks” makes him the odd fish out. They’re also...
...evidence’ of Lenny’s sexuality as is implicit in the film. Any reader who doubts the obviousness of the intended meaning of Lenny’s character should see the film immediately. It’s doubtful you’ll disagree. What Shark Tale ultimately represents, and what makes it so eminently aggravating, is Hollywood’s static view of homosexuality as something that must be hidden from the public. In a political atmosphere in which queers are increasingly gaining agency and winning countless victories in the marriage debate, Hollywood thinks itself sneaky...
...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...