This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Fishtales. If you have a copy of the DVD, you'll notice one thing if you look at the back cover, with what appear to be the doodles Pixar animators created in the days after someone pitched Finding Nemo that never changed peacefully coexisting with fish that looks like live action. SO, basically, it's a ripoff of Finding Nemo that promises "Fun! Adventure! and Fish Facts!"
- Well, the animation looks like it's screensaver quality at best. Lip-sync is only slightly better than something like Trolland. One character, Olly the Octopus, looks at first glance like she's (yes, apparently she's a "she") hand-drawn, but it turns out it's just CGI.
- One of the strangest issues with this film is how shit the sound mixing is. The opening has a narrator and it's mostly drowned out by the music. There's a good chance that the music and sound effects might obscure parts of the dialogue. Not very good when the bulk of the movie is basically just one character narrating facts about sea creatures.
- So, is that an anglerfish... swimming close to the ocean surface? I'd have used the Richie Cusack clip, but at least it turns out it's
- Freshwater streams as part of the ocean?
- Yes, I'm currently 24 minutes in and it turns out that this is the plot: once Cleo the Anglerfish tries to inform a trusted adult Manta Ray named Crash that Olly the Octopus has apparently swim in the general direction of a shark, they decide to go on a journey (accompanied with a pufferfish who seems to speak in the sort of noises you hear on the other end of a phone in movies) and it almost entirely consists of them going to random stock footage of tropical fish with Cleo narrating facts about each species as it goes along, with Crash acting bizarrely oblivious to the point that she has to inform him that fish (like them) breathe through their gills and have scales. And every so often, they have to interact with one of these creatures, because they might know where Olly went. These characters they interact with are mostly CGI, except for the bizarrely long scene with the moray eel which consists of just a lot of stock footage that clearly keeps repeating. You know what? Fuck it, because I lived in the golden age of educational videos about nature, here's the Doring Kindersley Eyewitness video about fish.
I'd have included an episode of Henry's Amazing Animals about fish, but it turns out that there was never an episode of that about fish. - These jellyfish sting. Implying that there are jellyfish that don't? That's alarmingly irresponsible for something that's supposed to be educational. Granted, there are many whose sting is too mild to do anything to humans, but still.
- Fucking Hell, this is giving me so little to work with.
- How the fuck are we even getting these above-water images of the river?
- Why did Crash need to have "amphibian" explained to him when they encountered frogs and not when they found the sea snake half an hour earlier?
- And why are none of the three protagonists dying in the fresh water?
- And why is Crash repeating the information Cleo just gave about koi?
- And why do these seagull look worse than the birds in Birdemic? Why couldn't they just use stock footage like the rest of the movie?
- Why does the footage of the ocean's surface look so much like it was shot above water?
- One of the tales the ocean holds? That was barely a tale! It's just a collection of trivia about sea creatures!
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.