Slowly Learning...

So I've actually enjoyed the last couple of movies along this line, and Sharks Tale kept topping the movie list, so I went out and gave this one a chance. And I want that chance back. I'm not saying the movie was terrible, but it was so uninspired. Hollywood needs to see that making a pretty looking CGI, with noticable movie talent for voices, does not mean you've made a good movie. So where do I start with my complaints...let's start with the good.

The movie looks nice. It's well animated. There are a couple funny moments. Ok, I'm out.

Now the bad...

The setting is tired and boring. I've already seen an underwater adventure with Finding Nemo (another great movie), and I've had enough of taking non-human things and trying to force them into the human world. Yes they are fish, yes they talk, and I can deal with that. But I don't need to see the whole city environment as well, complete with sky scrapers, cop cars, and elevators (yes elevators to the tops of buildings, which of course you could just float up to). The whole city experience is overly forced into the movie.

Now the characters...Some were nice, but once again uninspired. We have Will Smith playing the stereotypical "black man" wishing to get out of the slums, except this time he's a fish. On top we have the generic slutty fish, the retarded crab for comic relief (doesn't really work for me), the outcast shark in the mafia run shark family, and the mafia connected whale wash owner. The one set of characters I acutally enjoyed were the rastafarian jellyfish. Of course once again these characters were just a ripped off version of Finding Nemo's surfer turtles and The Little Mermaid's Eels. I guess the writers saw how well someone like that went over in good movies and thought they'd try inserting their own into this movie. Also, once again these generic human roles seemed forced onto the whole thing. When I really think about it the setting and characters weren't so much forced into the film as much as the underwater setting was forced into a generic storyline with stereotypically generic characters.

So the setting sucked, the characters sucked, and the story was rather dull too. So could there be more problems? Oh yes, there can. My biggest fault of all in the movie would be the terrible pathetic puns of sorts. Along with the forced human world we have forced human objects, named with about as much cleverness as the rest of the movie was formed with. Let's see, we have the reporter Katie Current, Coral-Cola, Kelpy Kreme, etc... Ugh, I came up with uninspired names like in 7th grade. Now sometimes these "product placements" work in movies (i.e. Shrek 2), but in this film they just made to roll my eyes.

All in all I enjoyed aspects of this movie, but the novelty of computer animation has worn off for me. It's still a pretty sight to look at, but you need a story to go along with it. Thankfully the previous computer animated films had stories to go along with them, or else the entire genre may have flopped, which would be a shame. There have been plenty of good movies that work great in this format (Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Shrek, Shrek 2), but this film just flopped in my mind.

RATING: I Wish I Hadn't Paid Full Price (And You Shouldn't Either), Rent it if You Need to Entertain Young Children for the Afternoon.