All right, I’ll eat a few of my words. I was convinced this would be at best “not my kind of movie”, but now I have to say that it’s a shame that most people are, as I did, going to compare this movie to Finding Nemo. Obviously Nemo is going to come out the victor, but that doesn’t leave this one floundering. It’s really in my mind no worse than the original Shrek, with plenty of hilarious moments, mostly involving small animals pleading for their lives in amusingly human ways, (“And it’s so hard you see workin’ double shift at the factory…”). For a moment, with the bait-on-the-hook opening, I thought there was going to be another oh-my-god-thank-god-for-the-single-funny-character! subplot a la Scrat in Ice Age.

Shark Tale has an odd look to it, far from the hyper-realistic beauty of Finding Nemo, which is what first put me off the movie, but the characters and environment look far better in motion than they do in any of the promotional artwork or stills.

In general, I don’t like any of these Italian-American pastiches, which ultimately only ever seem to have Goodfellas and The Godfather to draw upon, I just think it’s kind of a stupid stereotype that only ever worked in those two movies – I think I watched some of “The Sopranos” but it struck me as the same kind of childish imitation (god forbid I should ever get held up by a real Italian-American heavy, I’d probably laugh at them). Here, however, even some of this stuff made me laugh a bit.

A pleasant surprise, really, shame about the Nemo comparisons. It’s not going to go down in history like Shrek or anything, but hey, neither is Shrek 2.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 10th, 2004 at 2:35 pm in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.