Although originally released in 2000, the film was re-dubbed for English audiences, and released in 2006 with new packaging to capitalize on Gang de requins (2004).
Animator Mark Flood credits this film with helping him achieve some of the success that he has had in his animation career - when looking up this film one day, he read that it had won a prize at the Chicago International Children's Film Festival, prompting him to take a look, and several months later, his film The Freak Next Door (2012) was accepted and screened at the festival after he submitted it upon reading about it.
The crowd scenes in the film, led by the dictatorial pilot fish Joe, are inspired by the scenes of the Nuremburg rally in The Triumph of the Will. The symbol on the bottle that gives the fish intelligence takes the place of the swastika on Leni Riefenstahl's movie.
The stuffed up California fly fish is a foreshadow of Fly turning into one.