Happy Fish - Hai-Alarm und frische Fische

I adore animation, I grew up on it, but I have seen some real stinkers. When it comes to computer animated films, at the top of my head, I can only think of Animals United and Doogal that are worse. Other than a couple of good frames in the haunted shipwreck sequence, The Reef(aka Sharkbait) is a mess.

The animation/graphics are terrible lacking in originality and attention to detail, in fact some scenes look incomplete. The colours are plentiful but look flat in shade and the backgrounds look as though they were taken out of Finding Nemo and Shark Tale. Worse are the character designs which are incredibly forced and stiff.

There is also some really poor writing as well, it is clichéd and lacking severely in humour and heart. The film is too short and has moments where it feels rushed or too pedestrian which further exposes the story for what it is. The story is also a major weak link, it is very thin and feels recycled of other (better) animated films. And even when it didn't feel like that, the level of unoriginality that is in this film is shocking.

None of the characters I felt anything for, they were either bland or annoying. On paper, the vocal cast seemed tolerable, on film they sound bored and sound as though they are not connecting with the characters.

Overall, as much as I love animation I really disliked this. 1/10 Bethany Cox

Functioning only as an apt definition for "hot mess," "The Reef" is really just an awful movie. The script, the voice acting, and the animation are not even a notch above film school amateur hour. In fact, a conscientious mouse jockey in his mom's basement could probably compose a 5-minute CGI short on his Mac with more going for it.

"The plot" does not matter as the similarities between it, "Finding Nemo," and "Shark Tale" are so obvious that Helen Keller could find them. The glaring deficiencies in the quality of CGI, screenplay, voice acting and the feeble rip-off of other far more capable screen stories makes one wonder why someone at some point didn't come to their senses and ditch this project long before it ever made it in the can.

It tries for some jokes but fails every time. In fact, I don't think I laughed once. Even purposefully bad groaners fail to elicit a chuckle. The puns are so deliberate and juvenile it's baffling that it could have passed muster to any adult sensibility. But, then again, even "Howard the Duck" got made.

One of the key reasons there are no laughs is that there is no good voice acting. There is zero personality attached to these characters. Everyone involved is phoning in it and probably going for a paycheck to cover their Christmas fund.

Movies like this make you appreciate the thoughtful craftsmanship of Pixar's movies. It makes you realize how vital the story and the composition of the script is - not to mention, of course, their vastly superior CGI animation. Even relatively "bad" CGI movies like Shark Tale and Madagascar have tons more personality and skill behind them than "The Reef" does. As desperately tired as I am of all these awful and cheaply made CGI movies about animals, insects, or both, at least most of them have some basic charm and a few jokes you may actually laugh at, thus in some measure vaguely redeeming themselves.

"The Reef," however, has no redeeming value at all. Best to leave this one alone as watching it will merely be torture.

The animation on this movie was so sub-par it is amazing it even made it to the screen. The movements are stiff and the faces are not very animated. There is no emotion in the faces and they are extremely bland and boring. The characters are all predictable as is the dialog. The main character, Pi, is so badly created he is almost forgettable. I guess the "big stars" offering the voices must have all cringed at the final product because it is embarrassing to watch.

The writing is stiff as well and the jokes are for toddlers or little kids.

If this was cut up and then shown on Sat. Mornings then it'd be above average, just.

This is a rip off of both Finding Nemo and Shark Tale, and a very bad one at that.

For the kids only. Young ones at that.

The Reef (aka Shark-bait) is a(n occasionally watchable) mess of a movie. The plot of the film has Pi, a fish from Boston Harbor fleeing south to "The Reef" to find his aunt after his parents are scooped up in a fishing net. Once on the reef he falls for the most beautiful girl in the area and runs a foul of a shark.

The film doesn't so much plagiarize Finding Nemo (which is sort of reversed here) and the other animated films from the last few years as rip them apart and stitches them together into a movie so unoriginal you'll swear you've seen it before. It's a jaw dropping in its unoriginality. There's a drinking game in this movie where you take a drink every time you spot a riff from some other movie. I'd love to see someone take the film and annotate it so that there is a list of steals.

The character designs run the gamut from really good to what were they thinking. The look of the girl fish for example is quite lovely, the design for Pi's "psychic" aunt is amusing, while the look of the three eyed friend of Pi's parents back in Boston is clichéd but very funny. On the other hand characters like the shark and the old timers are blocky and awful. The backgrounds are an odd mix. Some are fantastically detailed settings like Pi's aunt's home or the pirate ship which look great; on the other hand there is the nothingness of the open ocean (and I do mean nothingness), with the characters seeming to hang all alone in a world that's just the blank sea. (while I understand that's probably what it would look like in the ocean, its really dull to look at on the big screen). The some of the animation is lacking any sort of finished quality appearing as what looks like a half step up from test footage. Its as if they had an incomplete staff of animators so they could only really finish bits of the animation.

Oddly the dialog seems much better than the Frankenstein like plot. To be certain many of the jokes have been lifted from elsewhere and you will find yourself saying the punchlines before the characters do, but there's a good chance that you'll still be amused thanks to the work of people like Fran Drescher, John Rhys-Davies and R Lee Ermey who take their stock characters and turn them into something more than a wooden prop.

Its oddly amusing at times in a weird sort of way, but I can't recommend you actually pay to see this movie. To be certain this is the sort of movie you'll watch a couple of times on cable but that doesn't mean its worth your hard earned money. Its one of those bad movies that you find yourself enjoying on TV simply because its not as bad as your other choices and because its not really costing you anything.

Trust me this is a cable movie....

I'm sorry, but this movie absolutely stinks. Any review giving it more than one star is from someone just being nice. My 2 and 4 year old daughters watched it, like they do every new movie, 6 times in a row the first day. But now it's in the back of the pile and it never comes out.

It's hard to decide which is worse: the dialog or the acting. First, Andy Dick, like he does in every movie, stinks. Then there's the fake accents that sound so... what's the word... fake. Fran Drescher is so stale. Freddie Prinze Jr. actually sounds too stiff to be the hero.

Every aspect of this movie is a butcher job of a bad movie made worse.