more on shark tale

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[img]http://www.buffalonews.com/graphics/2004/09/30/0930lifea.jpg[/img]

There was, so help me, a reason to see "Shark Tale" at a film festival. That's why its parent studio Dreamworks hauled its newest big-star animated feature around the festival circuit from Cannes to Venice to Toronto.
I saw it in Toronto at a "press and industry" screening, and I couldn't be happier that I did. That's because about midway through the film it occurred to just about everyone in this film-savvy crowd that the funniest voice, by far, in this very high-profile cast was being supplied by - honest - Martin Scorsese.

He plays Sykes, a blowfish with bushy Scorsesean eyebrows who's the No. 1 assistant to Don Lino, the voracious and despotic head shark who's played with suitable mob authority by Robert De Niro (a man at the age where it's not only fun to make sport of yourself but, no doubt, to make a film or six for the kids and grandkids, too).

Don Lino is a kind of comic Al Capone with fins. His motto is "It's a fish-eat-fish world out there." But Sykes, I tell you, is a comic original. With Scorsese's rapid-fire machine-gun line delivery, what we all discovered to our delight is that one of the great living American filmmakers is a closet '40s radio comic (which, by the way, puts a whole new spin on his movie "King of Comedy" but we'll talk about that some other time). This is great comic timing at presto tempos, and it's a kick.

Who, among us, would have suspected that the director of "Taxi Driver," "GoodFellas" and "Gangs of New York" would get such a conspicuous charge out of playing a neurotic, power-mongering blowfish in a full-length cartoon? He's so good that, for my money, he outright steals the movie from the likes, no less, of Will Smith, De Niro, Jack Black, Renee Zellweger and Angelina Jolie, all of whom voice major characters in "Shark Tale."

It's the biggest joke of all in "Shark Tale," I think.

Truth time: in the wonderful new world of digital cartoons we're living in, "Shark Tale" is not quite up there with either of the "Shrek" movies or "Finding Nemo" (wherein you'll remember the movie was quite nicely stolen by the voice and personality of Ellen DeGeneres).

It's funny enough, though, in a true "family" way, i.e., smart and allusive enough for adults and acceptable for kids. There is a point of enlightened silliness where sophisticated adults and ordinary children meet and the modern style of big, animated feature, bless it, has found it over and over.

It's like this with "Shark Tale": the fearsome Don Lino, it seems, has a gentle vegetarian son named Lenny. So nice a sharklet is Lenny, despite his size, that he can't even eat a worm. Not only that, the sound of the threatening homicidal cellos in the "Jaws" theme scares him silly.

This doesn't make Don Lino happy. Don Vito Corleone only had to worry about his chooch son Fredo. This Lenny is a disgrace to sharkdom.

Everywhere else on the reef, of course, being a disgrace to sharkdom is a good thing. All the littler, friendlier fish are sick and tired of being marauded and swallowed whole by battalions of toothy bullying sharks.

Meanwhile, life goes on. Fish eat Kelpy Kremes for breakfast, there's a "Walk of Fame" featuring Mussel Crowe and Cod Stewart and, on cable news, the yackety-yak reporter keeping up with coral reef doings is named Katie Current (played by the very real Katie Couric - good move, that.)

In this world, when someone owes 5,000 clams to a loanshark, they really owe 5,000 clams to a loan shark. (As I said, funny for one and all.)

The center of a lot of the coral reef activity is the whale wash - a kind of undersea carwash for the ocean behemoths where, needless to say, turtle wax is applied by real turtles.

Oscar, who works the tongue shift at the Whale Wash, is played by Will Smith in sitcom jabber mode. Oscar, you see, becomes the hero of the coral reef when he takes credit for the accidental death of Don Lino's tough guy enforcer son Frankie.

Frankie is played by Michael Imperioli who just won an Emmy for playing Tony Soprano's messed-up right-hand nephew Christopher. Another "Sopranos" mainstay who voices a character in "Shark Tale" is Vincent Pastore, immortal to many of us on the show as the late and much-lamented "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero.

That the film was the target of some complaints by Italian-American anti-defamationists because it exposes children to stupid ethnic stereotypes is, it seems to me, mitigated completely by the fact that, as the best animated cartoons always have, it exposes the profound foolishness that lies at the heart of media stereotyping of all sorts.

The higher truth is that the silliness of the best film animation teaches kids nothing but sanity. Show me a kid who was, say, raised by Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and I'll show you one who develops, at the very least, a very healthy adult skepticism about everything currently offered by the Entertainment Industrial Complex.

The real danger, of course, is that such kids begin to think everything - from art to politics to war, crime and even death - is part of the Entertainment Industrial Complex.

That, too, is a subject for another time.

Right now, it's all about cartoon fish and they're doing swimmingly.