Shark Five – SeeFood (2011)

Directed by: Aun Hoe Goh | 89 minutes | animation, adventure, comedy, family

In the now overcrowded subgenre of animation films that take place under water (‘Finding Nemo’, ‘Shark Tale’, ‘Sammy’s adventures’), ‘Shark Five’ (international title ‘SeeFood’) is at first sight not a film that you have to warm up to. to walk. But when you consider that it is an animation film from Malaysia, it does spark interest. ‘Shark Five’ was successfully sold to international distributors at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, all of whom were impressed by the high quality of the CGI. Unfortunately, that – together with the often funny translated title (in German it got the nice name ‘Fischen Impossible’) is the only thing that stands out. The story of ‘Shark Five’ is incoherent, the dialogues often make no sense and the voice-over is downright irritating.

The plot of ‘Shark Five’ is about two friends. Julius, a white shark, and Pup, a bamboo shark. Everyone in the sea is afraid of Julius, because he would see them as prey, but in reality the diet of the dangerous sea dweller consists of… car tires. Pup has had other things on his mind lately than his best friend’s meals. He has seen poachers steal shark eggs and feels very depressed about it. When he hears from turtle Mirtle, the narrator of the story, that he can breathe on land, he heroically decides to save his unborn congeners. He is spurred on in his dangerous plan by Spider, the giant manta rays, who has made an obscure deal with the underworld of the sea, populated by ghouls and monsters. Meanwhile, Squidward tries to get rid of the Octopus Julius. Pup’s disappearance therefore comes as a matter of urgency, because Julius naturally wants to get his friend back. Squidward is quite a tinkerer and has transformed a submarine into a robot, in which Julius can sit and come ashore with the help of three other fish, which act as his hands and feet.

That ‘Shark Five’ is so incoherent cannot but be the result of the excessive duplication of other animation hits. We recognize the clay-animated figures from ‘Chicken Run’ in the chickens that Julius gets into a fight with on land, but they also have a little penguins-of-Madagascars about them. Julius appears to be the twin brother of Lenny from ‘Shark Tale’, and the moral message of the destructive nature of the polluting man has already been seen in ‘Sammy’s Adventures: The Secret Passage’. The film jumps from storyline to storyline, without retaining the tension of an unfinished subplot. The dialogues feel forced and often only serve as a bridge to the next scene. In addition, the story starts very slowly and the makers do not know how to keep the attention later in the film. Apart from the tip-top animation, with which the underwater world is colorfully conjured up on the screen, there is little to recommend ‘Shark Five’.