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What Shark Tale Did Wrong Part 2 So, the plot of Shark Tale is mediocre at best, and then in a scramble, they made it worse. But what else is wrong with this movie? Well, the characters. I expanded on this a bit when I was complaining about the plot. This doesn't surprise me and shouldn't surprise you; character and plot is inextricably intertwined. But there are some aspects which are best discussed independently. So, Smithfish is an rear end in a top hat. He's incredibly, glaringly arrogant with (as far as the audience can tell) absolutely nothing to back it up. The fact that he takes everything for granted and then... eventually learns not to do so is his arc, I suppose, so he had to begin this way, but they went far overboard. He comes across as willfully blind, not just ignorant. Also, he might not have a penthouse, but we don't really get the impression he's suffering. The flashback of his school makes it seem like a cute, middle-class institution of education, which you'd imagine results from a middle-class life (we don't see too much of Smithfish's circumstances, honestly). He isn't hungry or, as far as we can tell, languishing in any real way. He just doesn't have a wealth of luxury goods. This is also a problem with the film, I think. They're trying to suggest that Smithfish is poor, but they fail to deliver on how being poor is anything but a social inconvenience. There are some convenient children for him to be nice to, but he doesn't seem to be particularly nice to them either, come to think of it. He tells them to clean up a billboard they've graffiti'd (which comes off like chalk, so no huge deal), and later he tells them to go home when he fears they might see Lenny, who he is trying to smuggle back to the whalewash shack. At his best moments, he's a normal dude, but he never rises to the point where he earns our admiration as a hero. Lenny, for his part, is a better character, but he's still not great. He's too comically effeminate. Now, being effeminate is not the problem with him or anyone, but you really have to read it as the combined phrase: comically effeminate. The kind of pseudo-effeminacy that is played for laughs, but isn't really representative or women or homosexuals, more like middle-schoolers pantomiming what they think women and homosexuals are like. This would be a hugely bigger problem if the film weren't 100% on Lenny's side. This was a major, major bullet only somewhat dodged. It weakens his character for him to be such a stereotype. Also, nothing about him complicates this stereotype at all; there's no "he's this stock character, BUT--". They missed an obvious chance to give him nuance. Lenny does seem genuinely kind, though, which gives him a lot of leeway that you just can't grant to Smithfish. And you understand why he feels what he feels; his shame and dismay are familiar enough. However, the gently caress up some scenes, like his Star Wars "Noooo!" at his brother's death that come at cost to the character and your ability to relate to him. 6.5/10, ADEQUATE. Now, Angie... hrm. I'm so conditioned to awful, awful female characters that they exist on a different scale, really. She avoided a lot of pitfalls, and in such a way that you can tell that an honest-to-god woman was involved in this production SOMEWHERE. Small mercies. She's assertive and a little wacky.... Honest and outspoken, but prone to anger. She gives the film's only decent moral speeches, and part of the reason they can work is they feel justified coming from her (you know, and not Smithfish). Her biggest problem is that she's the love interest. If she weren't the love interest, she'd be great. I'd have loved her as "wise best friend who is onto you and knows you're loving up and TELLS you but jesus you're not listening!" (who happens to be female). But ultimately, she gets defined by her relationship with Smithfish. She's better than you'd expect from the film, but problems remain. Lola, the other female character (TWO?! Oh yeah, but they both relate to Smithfish's love life, natch) is an odd bird. Or fish. She's a superficial person who says as much and acts as much. And there are people like her; I've met them. Maybe it's fair to have someone like this. I don't like how she's cast as a villain, though. She and Smithfish are exactly the same over most of the film, but he gets to be a protagonist? Bullshit. Lola has ambitions, too. She even seems to be working and scheming towards them. They're the same! And when she's dissed, she beats the poo poo out of him and releases a can of quality vengeance. Cool, she seems motivated! Ultimately, I'd be angrier, but she escapes the film having lost nothing. She isn't killed or marginalized or what-have-you. She just returns to where she was at the start of the film: looking for a hot prize to seize. Best of luck, Lola! Pufferfish doesn't have a personality at all and he's awful. What he wants and why he's doing it and his angle and his nature all remain open to speculation because he has basically no development and makes no sense. At least his henchmen are consistently stupid henchmen who act like canned henchers. Pufferfish is evil mafia connect--no, bumbling dork--no, slimy white guy--no, blah blah. He's used as a tool to progress the film, but in the process, they forget that he's supposed to be a person. Horrible. I'll talk about Don Lino more in the "things the film did right" section, even though, to be honest, he wasn't really done right. But he is my favorite thing in the movie. You can't not love the caring dad + cannibalistic mafia boss combo. I mean come on! No other characters are even identifiable as "characters", as in having, you know, characterization. (See: stupid joke octopus.) Oh boy, and now it's time to complain about the art! This movie looks like a huge butt. The design is probably the most butt. Smithfish looks just... kind of gross. It's a hugely ineffective and unpleasant caricature. Lola's right up there too, though. They both look flat, plastic, unnatural, and just... weird. The hands at the ends of the fins are something the three main fish share, by the way, and it's weird. Smithfish's sort-of legs? Also weird. They're sometimes bent like human legs and sometimes used as fins and it's just visually confusing and... bad. Also, the faces aren't really set up for the kind of distortions they're attempting. They're trying to push these models far beyond where they comfortably go. [still writin' 'bout sharktale] Pick fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Apr 11, 2013 |
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Apr 11, 2013 17:54
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McDowell posted:Maybe Shark Tale started as the story of not gay allegory shark coming out to his fathet, and Will Smith was added in later drafts. I've really enjoyed binging through this thread. I watched Bee Movie long ago because I like bees, but, well. 
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Apr 11, 2013 20:16
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I can't get my head around how amazingly surreal it looks when Don Lino goes from sitting at the table to swimming straight forward. It's mesmerizing.
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Apr 11, 2013 22:47
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The best part about the shark designs is that they don't have the awful semi-anthro elements of the other fish.
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Apr 12, 2013 00:36
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Say, what other forgotten Dreamworks movies are going to cover? No one remembers that Sinbad movie or that horse flick, or will you do stuff like Delgo?
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Apr 12, 2013 01:43
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Say, what other forgotten Dreamworks movies are going to cover? No one remembers that Sinbad movie or that horse flick, or will you do stuff like Delgo? I actually like Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmaron and Sinbad. In fact, I like them better than the Dreamworks 2d films that people actually remember, like Road to El Dorado, which I... don't like?  Of course, Spirit benefits from horses horses horses!  For a girl who loved horses, there were horses in the horse horse movie, horses.Also, Spirit was co-directed by a woman as well. Man, Dreamworks has a way, way, way better track record of that than Disney/Pixar. Pick fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Apr 12, 2013 |
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Apr 12, 2013 02:19
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Tartarus Sauce posted:Stories in which the hero is ostracized or mistreated by his people, and they never receive their comeuppance and never apologize are fairly common. Wreck-it Ralph manages to do this right!
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Apr 12, 2013 02:40
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100Dachshunds posted:Wreck-it Ralph manages to do this right! Except they apologize offscreen.
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Apr 12, 2013 03:00
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Spirit's a beautiful movie and the animation on the horses is fantastic. It's a shame it's boring as hell to sit through though I don't really remember Sinbad or El Dorado, but I remember liking the latter and not liking the former when I saw them in theaters. V  V
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Apr 12, 2013 03:13
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All I remember from Sinbad is that Eris was voiced by Michelle Pfeiffer and her animation was utterly amazing. And then they... did nothing with her. 
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Apr 12, 2013 03:18
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majormonotone posted:Spirit's a beautiful movie and the animation on the horses is fantastic. It's a shame it's boring as hell to sit through though !Yeah, it is kind of boring. And the CG backgrounds look terrible. But really, the rest of the animation is loving great. Plus I have a soft spot for the wild west (especially as told from the perspective of people other than white male settlers). Das Boo posted:All I remember from Sinbad is that Eris was voiced by Michelle Pfeiffer and her animation was utterly amazing. And then they... did nothing with her. Yeah, it's a total waste, but her hair  .
Pick fucked around with this message at 03:35 on Apr 12, 2013 |
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Apr 12, 2013 03:33
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The CG in Sinbad is poorly done. Not that the animation itself is bad, but it is not blended with the hand drawn stuff well at all. I remember the like ice bird thing being especially bad. It's really jarring. Eris is great though. The voice acting on her is superb and the hair animation and animation on her in general is just a wonder to watch. Road to El Dorado owns up down and all around 
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Apr 12, 2013 03:44
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Just FYI Smithfish's name was Oscar, probably because (drumroll) Oscars are a type of fish
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Apr 12, 2013 04:35
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Pick posted:Lenny, for his part, is a better character, but he's still not great. He's too comically effeminate. Now, being effeminate is not the problem with him or anyone, but you really have to read it as the combined phrase: comically effeminate. The kind of pseudo-effeminacy that is played for laughs, but isn't really representative or women or homosexuals, more like middle-schoolers pantomiming what they think women and homosexuals are like. This would be a hugely bigger problem if the film weren't 100% on Lenny's side. I don't think the movie is on Lenny's side so much as it is against Don Lino's. The whole gay shark thing is more a wedge issue than it is a genuine character conflict. Note how Don Lino is shamed at the end as if he hated his son for being a gay shark even though there's no real textual evidence to support this reading of his actions. With the characters we have, the most reasonable interpretation is that Lenny's conflict should be about learning to trust his family enough to be forceful with them about how he can't change himself. But that's no fun at all, since this plot has no room for a final act that culminates in the humiliation of our "villain". To a limited extent, it also makes Smithfish likable because he accepts Lenny without reservations...in theory, anyway. Smithfish gains immediate tangible benefits from befriending Lenny. And even if he didn't, Lenny's deviant behavior is that he does not want to eat Smithfish. So like the rest of his actions in the movie, Smithfish's decision to accept Lenny is a pretty morally hollow one. Some Guy TT fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Apr 12, 2013 |
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Apr 12, 2013 06:11
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majormonotone posted:Spirit's a beautiful movie and the animation on the horses is fantastic. It's a shame it's boring as hell to sit through though In my old job I ended up inside this guys house and he loved that film. His living room carpet was literally a picture of a giant horses head, the fireplace was surrounded by horse statues, posters of the film were everywhere, the DVD had pride of place on the mantle at the centre of the room, facing outwards so all could see it (no other DVDs in sight, just that one). There were tons of Spirit merchandise in every available corner, he had the t-shirt on... yeah he really loved that film. Now I'm trying to imagine what it would have been like if he was obsessed with Bee Movie or Shark Tale instead.
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Apr 12, 2013 11:27
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Pick posted:In fact, I like them better than the Dreamworks 2d films that people actually remember, like Road to El Dorado, which I... don't like?
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Apr 12, 2013 13:50
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I would love to see a Sinbad movie that actually does the entire story. I realize this wouldn't be very marketable, but I wanna see that.
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Apr 12, 2013 14:51
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Just caught up with this thread. The Bee movie stuff was hilarious. Regarding Seinfeld and race, people might be interested in this: http://harpers.org/archive/1998/03/the-one-where-jerry-disses-the-pool-guy/ Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read it. I read the print copy years ago and it stuck with me for some reason. Here's a link that sorta explains what it is about : http://www.jewishjournal.com/old_stories/article/the_antiseinfeld_comes_to_la_19981113 Fake edit: This is a dfferent version that has a lot of the same content: http://books.google.ca/books?id=vza...epage&q&f=false
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Apr 12, 2013 15:52
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Xander77 posted:Really? Road to El Dorado had decent... pretty much everything, really. You could take exception to the religious thing, I guess, but it didn't really go for the "poor benighted savages" angle. I don't think it's a bad movie at all, I just don't care for it for whatever reason. I readily acknowledge that my tastes are not 1:1 with quality, though I like to think there's overlap. Some Guy TT posted:I don't think the movie is on Lenny's side so much as it is against Don Lino's. The whole gay shark thing is more a wedge issue than it is a genuine character conflict. Note how Don Lino is shamed at the end as if he hated his son for being a gay shark even though there's no real textual evidence to support this reading of his actions. With the characters we have, the most reasonable interpretation is that Lenny's conflict should be about learning to trust his family enough to be forceful with them about how he can't change himself. But that's no fun at all, since this plot has no room for a final act that culminates in the humiliation of our "villain". Hmm, yeah, there are some very good points here. Really, it should have been Lenny asserting himself and assuring his father that his fey personality was not synonymous with weakness. Which was core issue, though the movie does a bait-and-switch in its regard, it feels--resolving a similar issue, but not actually the one we were presented with initially. Also, I can't overstate how much this resolution is weakened by Smithfish stepping in and doing it when Lenny had begun that conversation himself. And in a way more likely to get at the real issue. But I guess there was a scene that Smithfish didn't obnoxiously dominate, and we can't have that, now can we. We can't have that. They won't give it to us  .Smithfish seems unusually genuine with Lenny (I'm trying to be fair here, but nnrrrr) but it really can't compensate for what an rear end he is for the rest of the film. It really seems like it's more of a result of how the filmmakers wanted Lenny to be treated by any and all protagonists than how they wanted to characterize Smithfish specifically. Pick fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Apr 12, 2013 |
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Apr 12, 2013 19:12
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You referenced Antz once or twice, does it remotely compare to Bee Movie or Shark Tale? I'd love to see your reaction and get your perspective on other bad animated movies. Someone mentioned Delgo, that's the one famous for being the biggest bomb ever or something like that, right? Outside of that context I know nothing about it. There's Hoodwinked and a few other goofy "self-aware" fairy tale movies from that time that would be perfect for this sort of thread too.
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Apr 12, 2013 20:04
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I like Antz. It's not super, but it's pretty good. Better than Bug's Life, which I also hate, but isn't technically awful. Delgo was a legendary bomb. I wanted it to succeed--=it had a great backstory in terms of development--but nooooooooooope!
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Apr 12, 2013 20:18
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Loving your new thread title. Anxiously awaiting a report on the Bee Movie commentary and see if it reveals any suspicions we had about the production.
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Apr 12, 2013 20:51
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It sucks that Sinbad had to be whitewashed because I can only imagine the shitstorm that would have happened when a children's cartoon hero was an Arab in 2003. My favorite part of Eris other than the gorgeous animation was the leitmotif she had (or was it only one time, I've honestly forgotten) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUQYCf4OXyg Xander77 posted:Really? Road to El Dorado had decent... pretty much everything, really. You could take exception to the religious thing, I guess, but it didn't really go for the "poor benighted savages" angle. Plus the stone jaguar was  as gently caress.
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Apr 12, 2013 22:25
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Maybe a review of Delgo or Foodfight could be next for the QDZ (Quality Dead Zone). After all, it seems difficult to believe at this point that a movie could be less intelligent, more poorly thought out, and altogether terrible than Bee Movie but those two movies hold the title.
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Apr 12, 2013 23:05
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Honestly, I'd rather read earnest reviews by Pick, positive or negative, than become yet another lovely movie circlejerk like every other internet reviewer out there that covers this kind of material. Having an extensive knowledge and passion for animation and zoology is plenty.
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Apr 12, 2013 23:52
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That's true too. Good or bad, the best reviews come as a result of the reviewer having a genuine passion for the product. Pick's gushing about ParaNorman in the other thread got me to bump it up to the top of my netflix queue and I'm looking forward to watching it with my niece and nephew now. 
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Apr 13, 2013 00:49
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I could get behind a Pick's Animated Narrative Analysis thread. Part of what I like about the writing style is that she presents a lot of information objectively so it's easy to form opinions without assuming an agenda behind her motivation. That's the main problem I have with most lovely movie bashfests. If you're taking requests, Pick, and aren't picky about the theme, I'd be genuinely interested in a similar analysis about Paranorman. It's a great movie, and I definitely believe it was the best animated film released last year. But there's certainly parts I could stand to appreciate more, and I'd especially like a value-neutral discussion of some of its plot points. I think it's an open question, for example, whether it deals with the problem of the townspeople's complicity as well as it could.
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Apr 13, 2013 01:17
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What's Wrong With Shark Tale part 3 I was sort of procrastinating on this, since it requires me to go back and get more screencaps. Bleh. In my mind, Shark Tale has two dominant design problems: 1. Inherently bad design of specific characters (not really settings... honestly the sets all look fine, or in the case of the sunken Titanic, pretty good.) 2. Inconsistency of design. The former is easier to point out than the latter, since the latter is only really hammered home if you watched the damned thing. Which I can't, in good conscience, recommend. Just try to keep this problem in mind as we explore that first problem. Many of Smithfish's problems are evident in this .gif. Actually, it sums up a lot of what's wrong with this character, period.  Da na na na can't touch this! But some static caps too!  He looks insanely weird when he's swimming like a, you know, fish. It sort of reminds me of the Dr. Killinger episode of Venture Brothers when Rusty is hallucinating his father's huge penis with Killinger's face on it. Oh, hey, thanks, internet! (Vaguely  ?)  *It's worth noting that he makes faces like this a lot, and they're not exactly endearing. But on a more technical standpoint, they distort badly. I could find better examples, but it's not really worth it to me. This was just from moving the little bar along the bottom of VLC media player I mean poo poo legal dvd program legal.  The slope of his face also makes just about every angle look awkward. This is probably why he seems to be at 3/4 at a flat angle as much as humanly possible. It took me a few minutes to find him in pure profile. His eyes are located oddly. I mean, trust me, pufferfish looks like hell too, but you can at least show him sideways without the audience feeling uncomfortable.   This is the worst incarnation of this incredibly cliche reveal shot I've ever seen in film.  ooohhh mr. darcy Anyway, these problems are also evident in Angie and Katie Current (who was actually voiced by Katie Couric), but not nearly to the same extent. So what the gently caress? Why are your similarly-structured peripheral characters so much more appealing than your main loving character?  They normally even have the good sense not to have Angie use her tailfin as legs. But even when they do, it looks better than on Smithfish! I don't understand it. Villains notoriously get cooler designs than heroes, since they can be further exaggerated in novel ways, but honestly it's baffling why two characters so similar can have such a quality gap. And in this direction!  One reason Kate and Angie look better is that their profile isn't nearly as alien and off-putting. Also, both of them are represented by one dominant color. This helps them stand out and appear discrete when in crowded scenes. Smithfish's blue and yellow pattern disrupts his silhouette far more, and looks terrible as lighting conditions vary. To further complicate this non-pattern of design quality, Lola looks like crap.   Still not as bad as Smithfish though.  However, the human-skin-color they used for her is creepy as hell, especially since it's found on no other fish. Other than that, her colorscheme is okay, and I like how they made her hair glitter. Ugh, I'm complimenting anything about her design. Meanwhile, pufferfish's biggest problem is that his design is just completely loving uninspired.  Only with a weird face that god drat reminds me of something, but I'm not sure what. If I can place it, I'll let you know. I don't like it though. Oh, and weird eyebrows that are too gray for his otherwise brown color palette.  His face distorts poorly too. But I swear to God, it's still better than Bee Movie. Oh, relatedly,  These two henchmen are the ones who try to have Smithfish killed. But latter they get to change alignments along with pufferfish with zero consequences at all. (They even get to hang out in Smithfish's penthouse and play video games?) They were voiced by Ziggy Marley (son of Bob Marley) and Doug E. Doug. Some people might see the presentation of these two characters as racist, and maybe it is, but I'm not going to discuss that because I'm white as hell so it doesn't really feel like my place. Like Will Smith and Oscar (which, as noted, is his real name), the design is strongly informed by the voice actors. Their heads move really well underwater. It's remarkable, considering that basic things like Lola's lips have huge, huge problems. Jelly underwater? No problem! a main character blinks? Disaster zone! Two characters in particular look loving awful, and they're the two superfluous joke characters. In both cases, their silhouettes, textures, styles, everything are jarringly awful. They don't look good, period, but more than that, they just do not stylistically belong in this film at all.   Ugh. Muddy, splotchy, creepy, and not streamlined whatsoever (which, all other faults aside, is something the creators remembered to keep consistent among the other characters). They clash with everything. And they're awful characters. They're an eyesore visually and a brainsore conceptually. So loving bad. Oh man, and yet somehow I hate the design of that loving shrimp even more!  loving christ. They were intentionally trying to push cutesy too far, but it's too loving far, knock it off!! Anyway, I'm going to talk about the shark designs in the "good things" section. Sure, they're not great designs, but they really shouldn't be in the same post as the travesty you have just witnessed. I also think I'm done with the "what's wrong" section, because mostly it's hammering home the same basic point: this movie sucks. And I want to make sure you know that--I mean really, really know that. ... So that when I move on to "what's right" (or "what could have been salvaged") you realize that I am not trying to excuse this film. But. Some very talented people were working on this film, and I want to acknowledge that I noticed. I'm sorry, whoever you are, that you got assigned this project. But thank you for trying. If you worked on the Titanic set, you did a good job, regardless of the quality of the film as a whole. You did good. You couldn't have saved this film, but you bore your torch bravely, and prevented this from being Bee Movie. I know it's cheap to keep referring back to Bee Movie. It's basically my Godwin's Law of film by now. Except Hitler had the decency to be right about smoking. 
Pick fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Apr 13, 2013 |
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Apr 13, 2013 02:42
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Pick posted:What's Wrong With Shark Tale part 3 No hurry, seriously. You're writing up some pretty in-depth content. I don't think anyone will begrudge you taking your time on it.
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Apr 13, 2013 02:51
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Pick posted:Only with a weird face that god drat reminds me of something, but I'm not sure what. This was the first thing that came to my mind. 
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Apr 13, 2013 03:20
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Ineffiable posted:Anxiously awaiting a report on the Bee Movie commentary and see if it reveals any suspicions we had about the production. I genuinely don't know if I can survive that sober. I might just do a commentary track of the commentary track, drunkenly weeping "gently caress you" over and over. Yonic Symbolism posted:Maybe a review of Delgo or Foodfight could be next for the QDZ (Quality Dead Zone). After all, it seems difficult to believe at this point that a movie could be less intelligent, more poorly thought out, and altogether terrible than Bee Movie but those two movies hold the title. Delgo is tempting (in part because I feel sorry for it), but Foodfight is just too awful. To tell you the truth, I wouldn't have watched Bee Movie if I'd known how bad it was either. Some Guy TT posted:I could get behind a Pick's Animated Narrative Analysis thread. Part of what I like about the writing style is that she presents a lot of information objectively so it's easy to form opinions without assuming an agenda behind her motivation. That's the main problem I have with most lovely movie bashfests. I was doing an in-depth review of Brave Little Toaster before the animation thread pissed me off. I might re-do it, since that's my favorite film and it's absolutely begging for this kind of analysis. It's an unbelievably dense story. Rango is also a strong contender. They also benefit from me putting them on in the background dozens of times as I've painted or cleaned house, so I feel I have an unusually deep familiarity with both. As my ParaNorman thread indicated, I love, love, love ParaNorman, but it's not perfect. But I think I'd need to stew a little more before I wrote a review of it. But as one example, I think Norman's dad is visually overexaggerated in a film that is almost artistically unassailable. I have some concerns about the two police officers as well. What's weirdest to me about them, though, is that they are almost exactly like the two cops in Gravity Falls, but those two products are contemporaries and there's no reason to assume either one "stole" from the other (though for the record, Gravity Falls is newer). Super weird. ...of SCIENCE! posted:Honestly, I'd rather read earnest reviews by Pick, positive or negative, than become yet another lovely movie circlejerk like every other internet reviewer out there that covers this kind of material. Having an extensive knowledge and passion for animation and zoology is plenty. I'm actually really glad to hear this, since I felt... almost guilty after writing the Bee Movie review. I have a deep respect for animation and those who produce it, so to just... hate something they've made without reservation felt very out-of-character for me. For god's sakes, I have Quest for Camelot on DVD. But I just couldn't find anything to like about it. Pick fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Apr 13, 2013 |
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Apr 13, 2013 03:23
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Wait what happened in the animation thread? I remember a really long look at Brave Little Toaster and how utterly loving depressing it is if you really pay attention, but I thought that went through the whole movie. Was that someone else?
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Apr 13, 2013 03:38
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Macaluso posted:Wait what happened in the animation thread? I remember a really long look at Brave Little Toaster and how utterly loving depressing it is if you really pay attention, but I thought that went through the whole movie. Was that someone else? That was me, but I quit in a huff partway through. e: Oh, apparently not in a huff, the huff was something else. I don't know why I quit the BLT one actually. Pick fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Apr 13, 2013 |
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Apr 13, 2013 03:40
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Pick posted:I was doing an in-depth review of Brave Little Toaster before the animation thread pissed me off. I might re-do it, since that's my favorite film and it's absolutely begging for this kind of analysis. It's an unbelievably dense story. Oh, yes, please pick this back up again! Your "Brave Little Toaster" analysis so far is seriously one of the best things I've read on the boards.
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Apr 13, 2013 03:43
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Oh woah I totally forgot this huge problem!! (Part 5?) I can't believe I almost forgot to mention something hugely and obviously wrong with this movie! The whole "vegetarian" thing. This is particularly conspicuous in the context of Madagascar, which was released a year later (2005). ... And really, the whole food chain thing as it relates to fish society. Now, who here remembers Madagascar? Most people look back on it fondly, even as a turnaround for Dreamworks, but I am not a particular fan. One reason I don't particularly enjoy Madagascar is the Alex plotline. In sum, he's a zoo lion who has been fed steaks all his life. Once he gets out to the wild, he realizes that he needs to eat meat, and meat is actually... other animals! There's an angsty sequence where he realizes it isn't safe for him to be around his old friends any more. He needs to eat, is obsessed with it really, and in the wild, it means that you must kill. Woah. Woah that's harsh. How do you resolve something like that? Lions need to eat meat, end of story. Lion King remembered to... steal the solution of insectivory from Kimba... temporarily... anyway. And Madagascar continued that noble tradition and had Alex realize he can eat fish! This is lazy as gently caress, in my mind. The conflict is interesting: Alex has a need inherently in mortal contradiction with that of his lifelong friends. Must they part? Is it worth it to stay together knowing one may put the rest in danger? And how do you, a zebra, handle this revelation? A terrible reality has been unmasked. But don't loving worry, he'll eat fish. You always have to be careful with anything that can be read as an orientation/race/religion/whatever analogue. Having Alex shuns what he needs and naturally should partake in (you know, as a lion who was born a lion and wants to be a lion) in lieu of some bullshit substitute he's never formerly wanted.... I don't know. It feels off. The suggestion, to me, is that if your natural desires make other people uncomfortable, instead of assert your fundamental needs, you should make weird sacrifices to facilitate them. I mean, maybe if Alex were a pedo this would make sense, but that's not really the vibe you get from the film. And if it's more a homosexuality/race/religion/whatever analogue, what the gently caress is the movie telling us here? So in Shark Tale, Lenny is a vegetarian, which is pretty strongly implied to be  . This already seems like a bad move. Vegetarianism is a popular whipping boy on the internet OF BACON, HAHA. BACON. but there's nothing wrong with people choosing to avoid meat. (And some religions, such as Jainism, require it.) And it is almost always a choice. So conflating these two seems to invite a few translation problems. ... But more than that, Smithfish says that more sharks (all sharks!) should be like him. Isn't it as wrong to force that on other sharks as for other sharks to force it on him? I mean, if it's not a choice, which they're suggesting it's not? (Since Lenny barfs if he tastes meat.) And if we're using this as an analogue for homosexuality, is he saying all sharks should be gay? This isn't reaaaaally what the gay rights movement is about. Well, okay, other fish are sentient. So that's a complication. We'll ignore that Smithfish is, as far as I can tell, a bluestreak wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) which eat parasites, which are still, you know, living things and technically made of flesh. But does "eat kelp!!" actually resolve anything in a satisfactory way? This issue of who can eat what, shark-...wise... gets brought up in Finding Nemo, and I have the same problems with it there as here. Sharks are supposed to goddamn eat meat. That's their role. Anthropomorphizing animals this way is, in my view, morally wrong. It tends to make people have negative views of creatures just doing their goddamn jobs. Sharks are in the middle of a global extinction crisis due to wasteful overfishing. They don't need your judgmental bullshit. It's not evil for animals to do what they do. And if you don't want me to get annoyed at that, don't make it a central point in your movie! By the way, none of the other sharks go vegetarian as far as I can tell, so I guess they still get to eat people at least ^  ^.Or what if they can't?! What if they have to rely on eating humans now?! ... That would have been a great ending .
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Apr 13, 2013 04:36
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I've never seen Shark Tale. All I remember about it from the media was gay sharks, bad reviews, and why did it get an Academy Award nomination no one seems to know. Obviously, I wasn't expecting it to be a great movie- but your write-up genuinely surprised me in how badly this metaphor was fumbled. I've tried to write in this thread before about how the movie's "progressive" message is wrecked, but I gave up because I couldn't figure out how to make the analogy work. If Smithfish is self-serving for befriending a shark that doesn't want to eat him, what possible counterpart could that have with an actual gay person? Who's existentially threatened by heterosexual sex? It's like this completely insane riddle. This is all a major reason why I'm really very skeptical that the filmmakers here were actually trying to make a pro-gay message. I'm sure this is what the studio wanted us to think, since it improves the movie's profile. It may well have been enough to secure it an Academy Award nomination, since it's difficult to imagine any other reason for its selection saved that people (who probably never actually saw it) liked the supposed message. Thinking more positively, I can think of one animated movie that deals with the predator-prey problem surprisingly well, in a way that really forces the viewer to rethink a lot of what had happened up until that point. I'm referring to the Korean animated film Leafie: A Hen Into The Wild (referenced earlier in this thread), which I can't describe in more detail without completely ruining the storyline development. I will state, though, that it's a very good case for why anthropomorphized animals really kind of stink compared to the kinds of storylines you can build with realistic animals instead.
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Apr 13, 2013 06:30
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I would love to see more of your brave little toaster analysis, I really enjoyed it in the old animation thread. On the subject of anthropomorphised (living human like lives) and semi-anthropomorphised (living animal lives but able to speak and reason) animals and meat eating, it's something that's hard to get around. Once your animals are sentient language users, the morality of meat eaters eating meat becomes extremely hard to "justify" in protagonists without essentially justifying murder. There are a few ways around it, one is to stick to one species as protagonists and make the meat eaters a non-evil but extremely dangerous force of nature, ala watership down and it's derivatives. The foxes and badgers are just another danger in the environment, and presumably have their own society, but there is no overarching animal society where rabbits and foxes communicate and share a culture. In many ways this harks back to ancient humanity, members of your tribe or band were "the people", those guys on the other side of the river were "the enemy" and you spent most of your time knocking the poo poo out of each other. Or you can really explore it, there's a pretty fun kids manga called Animal Country (dobutsu no kuni) which spends a lot of time philosophising about sentient animals killing other sentient animals and comes out with a kind of "life is pain, you just gotta survive!" kind of mindset but with lots of characters fighting against it (including a vegan panther who ends up emaciated and starved). Or you can kind of flange it, Animals of Farthing Wood got around it by having their core gang of animals make a micro truce not to eat one another but strangers were fair game, and as you said Lion King and Madagascar just say "welp, insects/fish don't count, eat away!". If you're going for a more humanised animal culture with an actual society and buildings and technology, you pretty much have to have the meat eaters as either criminals/an evil empire, or bypass the whole thing by having non sentient animal analogues. Making meat eating/non meat eating into analogues of human groups is pretty unwise though, especially if one or the other side comes out as a minority of some sort. Meat eating is literally a sharks nature, and painting it as either desirable or undesirable when you link it to aspects of human society which DON'T involve killing sentient beings is fraught with danger. ESPECIALLY if you make it a choice, if sharks can eat kelp and choose not to, they are certainly evil because the alternative is constant, unrelenting murder. If they simply cannot live without eating other fish, it becomes a much more interesting dilemma.
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Apr 13, 2013 12:28
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Like everybody on this thread, I love your analysis. Im curious to see your Brave Little Toaster one, because I watched the hell out of that movie when I was little.
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Apr 13, 2013 16:56
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Some Guy TT posted:I've never seen Shark Tale. All I remember about it from the media was gay sharks, bad reviews, and why did it get an Academy Award nomination no one seems to know. Obviously, I wasn't expecting it to be a great movie- but your write-up genuinely surprised me in how badly this metaphor was fumbled. I've tried to write in this thread before about how the movie's "progressive" message is wrecked, but I gave up because I couldn't figure out how to make the analogy work. If Smithfish is self-serving for befriending a shark that doesn't want to eat him, what possible counterpart could that have with an actual gay person? Who's existentially threatened by heterosexual sex? It's like this completely insane riddle. If you watch the film, I think you'd see it more, and in fact I've considered making a "shark scenes only" video because the sharks, including Lenny, feature in maybe 1/3 of the film. Smithfish vastly dominates the runtime. I think part of it is Jack Black's delivery, which had to be intentional. I mean, if you told me that Kung Fu Panda and Shark Tale shared a voice actor for their titular animals I'd be all, "whaaaaat?" No matter what you might think of Jack Black as an actor, I think he's a very convincing voice actor. I usually ignore Cracked, but for some reason, I read an article they posted about comedy performance in film, and it included this line: "Some of the jokes [Leslie Nielsen] saves in The Naked Gun movies should be verified by the Catholic church as miracles." That stuck with me, because I tend to remember dramatic and comedic lines like this--Star Wars is full of them, for example. A few lines in Shark Tale definitely qualify as well (and to some extent KFP. I always laugh at the "can't even beat you to the stairs" line, even though on paper it's not really that funny). But Lenny wiggles suggestively in his chair, has to be "pushed off" by male characters for being too touchy-feely, does the whole hands-to-face thing (well, fins-to-face). Again, not really great or sensitive indicators of femininity/alternative sexuality, but ones that people are conditioned to identify. He also reveals to Smithfish that he's a vegetarian while on a bed, which I think visually suggests that what he's discussing is relevant to him being in a bed. But maybe I'm crazy; this film is only sporadically competent. Piecing out who was actually doing their job well and when is incredibly difficult on massive team projects. Also, I think I may be a little too hard on exactly how well a metaphor has to work. I mean, at the end of the day, the only perfect metaphor is an identical repeat. I guess I see view it with this distinction: a metaphor might not have to work on all levels, but it can't not work on too many levels. Shark vegetarianism might have worked as a stand-in for being gay if the writers had sufficient finesse. They didn't. quote:Thinking more positively, I can think of one animated movie that deals with the predator-prey problem surprisingly well, in a way that really forces the viewer to rethink a lot of what had happened up until that point. I'm referring to the Korean animated film Leafie: A Hen Into The Wild (referenced earlier in this thread), which I can't describe in more detail without completely ruining the storyline development. I will state, though, that it's a very good case for why anthropomorphized animals really kind of stink compared to the kinds of storylines you can build with realistic animals instead. Fatkraken posted:I would love to see more of your brave little toaster analysis, I really enjoyed it in the old animation thread. I basically agree with all of this. It's an incredibly thorny problem. But your last paragraph hits home as to why the presentation here was so broken. We never find out if other sharks can be vegetarian, by the way. So we don't know if that could have been a resolution. Thanks, movie clarity! Pick fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Apr 13, 2013 |
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Apr 13, 2013 17:55
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Swimming Smithfish reminds me of something.
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Apr 14, 2013 01:16
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