Shark Tale: Dreamworks Animation

Shark Tale Dreamworks Animation
It's not much more than a year since the success of Pixar computer animation's fish story, Finding Nemo, yet its rival, Dreamworks, has decided it's safe to go back in the water.

Shark Tale is Dreamworks animated take on aquatic life and although it shares one anthropomorphic joke with Finding Nemo - the one about the vegetarian Great White - it's careful to steer a very different course.

In Nemo's underwater scenes we were never allowed to forget for a moment that we were in the ocean. Its shimmers, tides and swells set the tempo, regulated the colours and furnished the cast of characters, whose human qualities were somehow kept in fine balance, with their fishiness.

Here, however, we're in a modern American metropolis - a place so thoroughly anthropomorphised that its underwater location seems purely incidental. Southside Reef this Atlantis is called and it has billboards, traffic lights, gridlock, Times Square and an execrable taste in puns displayed in "prawn shops", "Coral-Cola" and those well-known retailers "Gup" and "Old Wavy". There are rappers, Rastafarians and intrusive TV reporters with Australian accents. Well, one.

With apologies to NBC's Today Show host Katie Couric, she's called Katie Current and is voiced by our own Tracy Grimshaw. At least she is in the version of the film being shown here. I