Pop et le Nouveau Monde

This was very disappointing. The animation and script are both lacking, making for boring viewing. I watched this with my 2 boys (ages 9 and 7) and couldn't help comparing it with it's much more sophisticated (and funnier) brother "Finding Nemo". Having watched many animations over the years, I've come to expect a script that appeals to both children AND the parents or adults who accompany them to the cinema. This film was so unfunny and cliché, plus it took time to get going, with lots of scenes that didn't seem to add anything to the plot. In fact, a lot of the story is disjointed, with no setting of the characters and how they relate to one another, or why the main character is on his quest. I would avoid this unless you've watched just about everything else and are left without much choice...

I have just registered with IMDb because I felt I really needed to add my comments about this movie. It is so disjointed and just doesn't work. My daughter picked it up at Blockbuster but it was so hard going. It was very slow and random scenes kept coming into it with no real explanation. I kept expecting it to pick up but it never really did. The voices are OK and the animation is good, just the story line and switching between scenes that doesn't work at all. I think Animals United matches it as being a very poor film....disappointed. If you are looking for a friendship/environmental animation, then go straight for A Turtles Tale, by far a much better film....especially in 3D!

Even though I did enjoy it Parents need to know that despite some bright, colorful animation, and a few appealing heroes, Sea Level is filled with dark images, eerie music, bullying used as humor, scarily-mutated sea creatures, an abusive human father, and characters constantly in fear for their lives. Viewers, especially young ones, will find the film's often disconnected structure and abrupt scene endings hard to follow. If Sea Level is meant as a humorous, cautionary tale about protecting the planet and its oceans, that message is as random and murky as the story itself and the few humorous sequences don't qualify it as watchable. Recommend for older children James Welch Henderson, Arkansas 1/4/2020

I was expecting Sea Level to be a cheap Finding Nemo ripoff similar to those bootleg Video Brinquedo movies, but it has a lot more effort put into it than those. The movie does have some interesting ideas, at least, but it's EXTREMELY slow. I almost fell asleep multiple times watching this, it's a huge slog up until the last 20 minutes or so.

The best parts of this movie are the action sequences, they're actually pretty engaging and fun to watch. There are a lot of them towards the end of the movie, but for the first ~70% of it, you'll mostly just be watching the characters talk. This would not be an issue, except this movie's dialogue is just so BORING. I don't think there was a single joke or witty line in the entire movie aside from a few sight gags. In addition, the movie's voice acting is...not great. The voices of the humans are all terrible, and the voice of Pup (the main character) gets pretty grating after a while...he just sounds really whiny the whole time.

I also don't think this is a very good movie for children; this is partially because the movie is extremely boring and won't retain their interest for very long, but also because a lot of it is just...not really appropriate to be showing to young kids. Mind you, I don't like it when parents go over the top with sheltering their children, but this movie is a bit more...extreme than most other children's animated movies I've seen. There's blood, animal carcasses, a physically and verbally abusive family, and at one point one of the characters says "hell". I wouldn't call my parents overprotective, but I doubt even they wouldn't have let me watch this movie.

All of those problems aside, the movie does have some good parts. I liked how the water and land animals kind of came together at the end, that was a neat idea. Making the main character a mudskipper (a fish that can breathe and walk above water) was also a cool concept, and it becomes very important later on in the movie. The other characters weren't much to write home about, though, aside from the chickens. The chickens were a lot of fun. Aside from them, the rest of the ensemble cast is pretty lame, and there's a "villain" (the eel) that literally does nothing in the entire movie. You could take him out of the movie completely and nothing would change. Also, like I said before, the action sequences were entertaining.

Overall, while Sea Level is WAAAY better than I expected, it is not a good movie. Watch Finding Nemo or even Shark Tale instead of this.

Julius and Pup are playing on the sea floor when two young human divers grab the shark eggs. Pup tries and fails to stop them. He becomes depressed over his failure. Julius tries to catch chicken on the beach and is almost stranded. Later, he's caught by fishermen looking for shark fins and barely escapes. Pup tries to recruit turtle Murtle and octopus Octo on a mission to rescue the shark eggs.

This Malaysian animated film tries to jump up to the major leagues. The difference between this and a movie like Finding Nemo is more than the technical animation. The animation is slightly inferior but one can live with that. It's the muddled story that is the most problematic. Hollywood has a near century of experience telling stories on the big screen in less than two hours. That's what is missing in this movie. If Pup's journey is the key, then the other characters should serve him in the story. The story becomes muddled and it loses the rooting interesting of the audience. As a technical exercise, this holds a little bit of promise if the aim is a lot lower. It does need a good story teller to clean this up.