Shark Tale 2004 Comedy Film Starring Will Smith

Underachiever Oscar Achieves Fame After Killing a Shark

Sep 14, 2009

Oscar works in the whale wash but dreams of being at the top of the reef. He claims to have killed a shark and gains fame and recognition as the 'Sharkslayer'.

Oscar is nobody fish who works in a whale wash and dreams of ascending to the top of the reef. He is given his chance when he takes credit for killing a shark, and becomes known as the Sharkslayer. The problem is that the shark Oscar ‘killed’ was the son of Don Lino and Lino is out for revenge.

Oscar (voiced by Will Smith) fantasizes about being rich and famous whilst he does his job as tongue scrubber at a whale wash. He also owes five thousand clams to his boss Sykes (Martin Scorsese) and if he doesn’t pay it back by the next day then he will be in serious trouble. His best friend Angie (Renée Zellweger) loans him the five thousand - and instead of giving the money to Sykes, he overhears a tip and bets it on a seahorse race.

Later, whilst out in the middle of nowhere, a pair of great white sharks Frankie (Michael Imperioli) and his vegetarian brother Lenny (Jack Black) come across Oscar and two jellyfish Ernie and Bernie (Doug E. Doug and Ziggy Marley). Frankie encourages his brother to kill Oscar to prove that he is a killer to their father Don Lino (Robert De Niro). Lenny doesn’t eat him and his brother Frankie decides to do it for him and is killed by a falling anchor.

Ernie and Bernie don’t see the anchor fall because they swam from the sharks and when they return they see Oscar standing over the body of a shark. Oscar sees this as his opportunity for fame and clams to have killed the shark. He is aided by Lenny who wants a new life in the reef away from the expectations of his father and helps Oscar convince the reef that he is a real sharkslayer.

Oscar gets the fame he always wanted but his life start to unravel as he struggles with maintaining fame based on lies

Shark Tale creates an undersea world that is closely modelled on the human world. The reef the fish live in is essentially a city, with various shops and businesses (although the audience will get a laugh from the sushi bar because obviously sushi is raw fish and for them it would be cannibalism). The characters themselves could easily have been played by human counterparts. The sharks are the mafia and live in a ship wreck. They also terrorize the reef meaning that the fish have to hide whenever they are in the surrounding area.

The environment is very colourful but Shark Tale suffers from the fact that it is telling a human story but uses fish instead of people. Younger audiences won’t understand the concept of someone owing money to loan sharks and probably will not get the joke. The voice cast are all A-List with Robert De Niro playing a shark that is an obvious parody of the character Don Vito Corleone from The Godfather (a role that De Niro played). However, the purpose of having De Niro playing a shark based on his character in The Godfather is a little curious considering that the target audience will be too young to get the reference.

Much of the advertising for Shark Tale tied it together with Shrek (“from the studio that brought you Shrek” is written on the DVD box). Shrek was a success but it does seem DreamWorks thought that they’d be able to reproduce the success of a film about an ogre with a film about fish.

Shark Tale does have a few laughs and the voice cast will be easily recognised. Unfortunately it seemed that Dreamworks were too invested in the famous voices instead of the story. Overall Shark Tale lacks the plausibility of Finding Nemo because underwater reefs do not look like human cities with big screen televisions and billboards.

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