Festin de requin

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.

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

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....

Truly, this is an awful film. I loved Finding Nemo and I enjoyed Shark Tale, and I saw this film expecting it to be less good than either of these films but worth a watch none-the-less. This was not the case.

Obviously I am not the target audience for this film. I am seventeen and this film is clearly aimed at children much younger than myself. However, most children's films are made bearing in mind that they will mostly be seen by adults as well. This film can't have been - there are no jokes for kids, let alone adults. The whole thing feels like a bad computer game; an impression emphasised by the bizarre pause that follows everything any of the characters say. The ending, especially, gives the impression that somewhere there's a kid with a console playing out the action.

Not everything in this film is appalling. Sometimes - just sometimes - it comes up with something that really is moving or humorous. However, the tears and the laughter quickly dry up when you remember that you saw the exact thing in Finding Nemo or Shark Tale, only better. The level of plagiarism this film reaches was previously unknown to me. Never before had I seen anything that ripped off anything else to the degree that this film does. Even Freddie Prinze Jr.'s enthusiastic vocals can't lift this one - he's clearly trying his best and, although his best is not wonderful, it shouldn't have found its way into a film this poor.

Overall, the animation is shocking, the characterisation is non-existent and the story has clearly been stolen and dumbed-down until it means nothing, makes no sense and makes the audience feel far more willing to buy that Finding Nemo DVD. Avoid. This. Film.

To be honest, this film is basically a very poor rip-off of Finding Nemo....

and is no where near as good, funny or entertaining, nor is the animation up to the same standard.

The plot is roughly the same, although this time he doesn't go after his parents - even the voices sound alike!

I really recommend that you don't go and see this film - even little kids who have seen other animated films (such as Finding Nemo, Shrek, Shark Tale, Over the Hedge, Madagascar, etc) may turn up their nose at this one.