'Shark Tale' makes an offer viewers can't refuse

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

SHARK TALE (PG) Three Stars (Good) An animated parody of gangster flicks, dressed up as an undersea tale of fish, with the sharks as mobsters. Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, and Renee Zellweger are voices. Vicky Jenson, Bibo Bergeron and Rob Letterman co-direct. DreamWorks, 89 minutes. DreamWorks Pictures

Fishy hero Oscar (Will Smith), top, works at the Whale Wash, where he is in deep debt to a pufferfish, Sykes (Martin Scorsese). To teach him a lesson, Sykes has two of his henchfish take Oscar on a trip where he finds an unlikely ally in a shark named Lenny (voice by Jack Black). The movie is based on characters from 1970s gangster flicks.

While the "Shrek" films have masterfully fractured fairy tales to entertain young and old alike, "Shark Tale" serves up an on-target parody of gangster flicks. To reinforce the gag, famed movie mobsters Robert De Niro, Michael Imperioli and Peter Falk join Will Smith and Jack Black as voice actors.

Adults will relish the send-up of "The Godfather" films, "GoodFellas" and "The Sopranos." The characters in "Shark Tale" sleep with the fishes even when they aren't dead. "Shark Tale" also leans heavily on "Car Wash," the 28-year-old comedy that starred Richard Pryor. (Most of the "Shark Tale" fish characters work at the Whale Wash, run by a conniving puffer fish, hilariously voiced by Martin Scorsese.) But while most of "Shrek's" comic references to fairy tales were clear to youngsters, I suspect the target-audience kids won't care much about mob flicks and an African-American movie classic. Still, "Shark Tale" offers enough conventional sight gags, lovable characters and underwater action to amuse the kiddies who don't know calamari from cannoli.

After all, "Shark Tale" is about an unlikely friendship, and any kid who's ever wondered how to make new friends will be able to relate.

Oscar (Will Smith) is a small-fry fish who works at the Whale Wash, but constantly tries to hustle his way into get-rich schemes. He's tired of being "a little fish in a really big pond — the ocean." Lenny (Jack) is a playful young shark with a good heart that can't possibly eat living creatures. He's a disgrace to his mobster father, Don Lino (De Niro), and older brother, Frankie (Imperioli).

Though they normally would be wary enemies, Oscar and Lenny come together as part of a scheme with a two-fold purpose: Oscar will be hailed as a surprising hero in his community because he'll seem to have killed a shark. And Lenny will be able to establish a new life for himself because his murderous family will assume he's dead.

The scheme backfires, but not before Oscar and Lenny have come to be friends — and with important lessons learned about being honest with yourself. The various voice actors masterfully created rich characters throughout, with a special nod to Scorsese, who nearly steals the film with his lightning-fast vocal inflections and even a funny, unexpected song.

The animation cleverly creates an urban world under water, with a section of the reef specifically decked out to resemble Times Square. The undersea world isn't quite as beautiful or evocative as that designed by Pixar for "Finding Nemo," but it's serviceable.

"Shark Tale" may not quite be an offer you can't refuse, but it certainly merits consideration.

Rated PG, with mild language, crude humor.

Celebrity voices add to attraction

LOS ANGELES — Quick! Can you name who did the voice of Snow White? Or Cinderella? How about the Little Mermaid?

It's OK if the names Adriana Caselotti, Ilene Woods and Jodi Benson don't immediately spring to mind — they were never promoted or paid as stars when their most famous screen characters debuted.

But now try naming the actors who voiced Shrek, the Genie from "Aladdin" or Woody the cowboy from "Toy Story," and it's easy to think of Mike Myers, Robin Williams and Tom Hanks.

Performing animation was not considered prestigious work decades ago, but those three performances have changed things over the past 10 years.

Now, practically every cartoon features famous voices.

The new undersea gangster comedy "Shark Tale" has a slew of them.

The computer-animated story of a scared little fish (Will Smith) who becomes famous as a "shark slayer" by surviving a shark attack when an anchor lands on his predator features the voices of no less than 12 famed actors.

Jack Black is his vegetarian shark buddy, Robert De Niro the menacing undersea gangster mourning his son and Martin Scorsese a puffy-eyebrowed pufferfish. Renee Zellweger plays a love-stricken angel fish, "The Sopranos" Emmy winner Michael Imperioli Black's vicious brother, Peter Falk an aging gangster shark and Angelina Jolie a femme fatale.

Add to the mix "The Sopranos" actor Vincent Pastore as an octopus, Ziggy Marley and Doug E. Doug as Rastafarian jellyfish, and "Today" show host Katie Couric as the fish reporter Katie Current.

Decades ago, Walt Disney barred Caselotti — who was 18 when she earned about $970 for her work — from making any public appearances. He didn't want viewers to put a face to Snow White's voice. Caselotti, who died in 1997 at 80, often said she deserved more, but never sued for it.

What changed over the years?

For one, Peggy Lee, one of the rare celebrity voices to do a cartoon years ago, successfully sued Disney for more money after the videocassette success of 1955's "Lady and the Tramp," opening the door for better pay.

Studios now find that a star is one more attraction for audiences. And actors find it's easy work — that pays enormously.

Over two years, Black said he went in about a dozen times to record the voice of Lenny, his nebbishy, bashful shark.

"I did it all by myself, except I did a little bit with Will Smith at the end. That felt like kind of a symbolic meeting of the thingies, just in case some magic happened between us. For the most part, it's an isolated experience and I like it that way. There are a lot of advantages to doing it by yourself," he said.

What are the advantages?

"You don't have to worry about the other actor getting impatient," Black said. "If you want to do 50 takes, no problem. Then I trust the editors to cut together awesome conversations ... so it really sounds like we're talking to each other."

It's unclear how much Black and his co-stars got paid, but DreamWorks Animation, which produced "Shark Tale" has been generous with stars in the past. Myers, Cameron Diaz and Eddie Murphy each reportedly received $10 million upfront for "Shrek 2," not counting their percentage of the profits from the year's biggest movie.

Although Black said he tried to perform a character — changing his real voice to make it sound more nasally and wimpish — but often the studio doesn't even want that.

They are hiring celebrities to be recognizable, after all.

"The first thing they established was that they didn't want me to do anything with my voice other than be myself," said former "Monty Python" star John Cleese, who voiced the ogre's king-in-law in "Shrek 2." "They didn't want me to try any kind of accent or different voice production. Once that was established, and they told me that in the first two minutes, it made my life a lot easier. I wasn't about to argue."