Notion in the ocean

Having seen this fishy piece of DreamWorks animation, voiced by the likes of Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Angelina Jolie and Martin Scorsese, in Venice's St Mark's Square at last month's festival, I couldn't help reflecting that an ancient culture was being somewhat rudely assaulted by that of the new.

Others, however, will have no such worries, though memories of Shrek et al will not be expunged by this only moderately successful underwater comedy thriller.

The fun of the piece is generated chiefly by plentiful pop-culture parodies. And by making its characters as much like those voicing them as aquatically possible.

This, the film's only one real idea, has Smith as a small fish in a big pond doing his usual, and by now expendable, jive-jabber; Jolie is a lippy angelfish, De Niro a Mafioso shark and Scorsese a fast-talking puffer-fish.

I rather lost the story in all this, but then it is so thin that even the briefest summary might give too much away. Suffice it to say that the Smith fish wants to get away from his dull whale-washing job, and the sharks vow revenge when they think he has killed one of them.

The great disappointment is the standard of the animation. It matches neither Disney's detailed The Little Mermaid nor Pixar's inventive Finding Nemo.

There is little sense of the underbelly of the sea and the overall design lacks any real charm.

Shark Tale will undoubtedly pull the customers in. But what will they say when they come out? Not all that much, I fear.

Shark Tale
Cert: U