Shark Tale

For the video game, see Shark Tale (video game).

Shark Tale
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Vicky Jenson Bibo Bergeron Rob Letterman
Screenplay by	Michael J. Wilson Rob Letterman
Produced by	Bill Damaschke Janet Healy Allison Lyon Segan
Starring	Will Smith Robert De Niro Renée Zellweger Angelina Jolie Jack Black Martin Scorsese
Edited by	Nick Fletcher Peter Lonsdale John Venzon
Music by	Hans Zimmer
Production company	DreamWorks Animation
Distributed by	DreamWorks Pictures
Release dates	September 10, 2004 (2004-09-10) (Venice) October 1, 2004 (2004-10-01) (United States)
Running time	90 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$75 million
Box office	$367.3 million

Shark Tale is a 2004 American computer-animated comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by DreamWorks Pictures. Directed by Vicky Jenson, Bibo Bergeron, and Rob Letterman (in Letterman's feature directorial debut), the film contains an ensemble cast starring the voices of Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Renée Zellweger, Angelina Jolie, Jack Black, and Martin Scorsese. It tells the story of a fish named Oscar (Smith) who falsely claims to have killed Frankie (Imperioli), the son of a shark mob boss named Don Lino (De Niro), to advance his community standing and teams up with the mobster's other son Lenny (Black) to keep up the other facade.

Shark Tale premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 10, 2004, and was theatrically released in the United States on October 1. It opened at #1, earning $47.6 million, the second-highest opening for a DreamWorks Animation film at the time, behind Shrek 2 ($108 million). Shark Tale remained as the #1 film in the U.S. and Canada for its second and third weekends, and made $367 million worldwide against its $75 million budget. The film received negative reviews from critics and generated controversy for its use of Italian-American stereotypes and alleged homosexual propaganda. It was also nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 77th Academy Awards, losing to Pixar's The Incredibles.

Plot

In the Southside Reef, a lowly bluestreak cleaner wrasse named Oscar fantasizes about being rich and famous. Soon after arriving for work at the Whale Wash, he is called to his boss's office, a pufferfish named Sykes, to discuss the fact that he owes a large sum of money and must pay it back by the next day. He remembers being humiliated as a child because his father was a tongue scrubber, so his angelfish friend, Angie, offers him a shiny pink pearl that was a gift from her grandmother to pawn and pay his debt. Oscar brings the money to the race track to meet Sykes but hears that the race is rigged and bets it all on a seahorse named "Lucky Day." A lionfish named Lola sees this and flagrantly seduces an excited Oscar. Sykes is annoyed that Oscar bet the money but agrees to see how the race turns out. When the race start, Lucky Day's door had been blocked (revealing that the rigging was against him), but then Lucky Day smash the door and catch up his delay. Moments before Lucky Day crosses the finish line, and he trips and loses.

Meanwhile, a family of criminally-inclined sharks, with associates such as killer whales, swordfish, and octopuses, has a problem with one of their sons, Lenny, a vegetarian. His crime lord father, Don Edward Lino, orders his violent eldest son, Frankie, to mentor his brother in the family business. Frankie sees Oscar left for dead in the middle of the ocean by Sykes' two Jamaican jellyfish henchmen, Ernie and Bernie, and urges Lenny to eat Oscar, but Lenny instead frees Oscar and tells him to escape. Furious, Frankie charges at Oscar, but suddenly an anchor falls on him, killing him. Devastated over his brother's demise, Lenny flees. As there were no other witnesses and Oscar was seen near the body, everyone in the reef comes to believe that he killed Frankie, an opportunity that Oscar decides to exploit for fame.

Oscar returns to the reef with a new title of "Sharkslayer." Sykes becomes his manager, he also forgives Oscar's debt, and Oscar moves to the "top of the reef" to live in luxury. At the same time, Don Lino has everyone search for Lenny and Oscar. When several sharks approach Oscar's neighborhood, his neighbors expect him to drive them away, so he goes out and encounters Lenny. Since he does not wish to return home and face his father, Lenny begs Oscar to let him stay at Oscar's house. Soon, Angie finds out about Oscar's lie and threatens to tell everyone. Oscar and Lenny stage an event in which Lenny pretends to terrorize the town, and Oscar kills him. Though this further cements Oscar's popularity and causes Lola to become his girlfriend while infuriating Don Lino. Afterward, Oscar and an angered Angie get into an argument. She reveals that she had feelings for Oscar even before becoming the "Sharkslayer," causing Oscar to dump Lola and reflect on the consequences of his selfishness. Lola then beats Oscar up in anger.

Soon, Oscar buys some gifts for Angie to discover that Don Lino has kidnapped her to stage a meeting. Lenny attends disguised as a dolphin named Sebastian. Don Lino threatens to eat Angie if Oscar does not comply. Lenny grabs Angie into his mouth (for Oscar to intimidate the sharks) but then regurgitates her and unintentionally reveals himself in front of everyone. Enraged, Don Lino chases Oscar through the reef. Oscar heads for the Whale Wash and trapping Don Lino, and accidentally trapping Lenny in the machinery. Everyone gives Oscar an ovation, but he finally confesses the truth behind Frankie's death. He then tells Don Lino that everyone loves Lenny for who he is and urges him to respect everyone's individual choices. Inspired by Oscar's confession, Don Lino reconciles with his son accepting him for who he is, and states that he and his gang bear the city no ill will. Oscar forsakes all the wealth he has acquired, makes peace with the sharks, becomes co-manager of the Whale Wash, now frequented by sharks, killer whales, and swordfish, and lives happily ever after with Angie.

Voice cast

• Will Smith as Oscar, a comical street wise bluestreak cleaner wrasse who works in the Whale Wash of Reef City who wants to be rich, but his schemes always fail, and he ends up in debt to his boss with five thousand clams.
• Robert De Niro as Don Lino, a shark and leader of a mob consisting of criminally-inclined great white sharks, who wants his two sons to take over his business and run it together, but becomes enraged when Oscar inadvertently gets in the way following one of his sons' death. James Gandolfini was originally set to voice the character but had to drop out.
• Renée Zellweger as Angie, Oscar's angelfish best friend and colleague. Angie eventually becomes Oscar's girlfriend.
• Jack Black as Lenny, Don Lino's youngest son, a vegetarian, younger brother of Frankie, and becomes good friends with Oscar.
• Angelina Jolie as Lola, a seductive female lionfish whom Oscar develops a romantic interest in. She only cares about money, calling herself superficial.
• Martin Scorsese as Sykes, the pufferfish owner of the Whale Wash and a loan shark to whom Oscar owes five thousand clams. He once worked with Don Lino but was fired and called in his debts to pay off the gangster.
• Ziggy Marley and Doug E. Doug as Ernie and Bernie, two Jamaican jellyfish and Sykes' enforcers, who enjoy torturing Oscar with their painful stingers when he is in trouble with their boss.
• Michael Imperioli as Frankie, Lenny's older brother and Don Lino's eldest and more vicious son, who is embarrassed by Lenny's vegetarian views. Frankie is killed after an anchor accidentally hits him.
• Vincent Pastore as Luca, Don Lino's green octopus "left-hand, right-hand man," with a tendency to state the obvious much to Lino's frustration.
• Peter Falk as Don Feinberg, an elderly leopard shark and leader of a mob of criminally-inclined leopard sharks, who is a friend of Don Lino.
• Katie Couric as Katie Current, the local reporter of Southside Reef in the U.S. release. At the time, Katie Couric co-hosted Today in America. In the Australian release, then local Today co-host Tracy Grimshaw dubbed the lines. Fiona Phillips of the UK's GMTV performed the voice for the British release of the film. Cristina Parodi of Italy's Verissimo provided the Italian version of the character.
• David P. Smith as Crazy Joe, a deranged hermit crab who is Oscar's friend. He lives in a dumpster near the Whale Wash.
• David Soren as Shrimp, a shrimp who fears being eaten by a shark and is an enemy to Don Lino.
• Bobb'e J. Thompson as Shortie #1
• Phil LaMarr as Prawn Shop Owner

Production

The film was originally developed under the title of Sharkslayer. By September 2003, it had been retitled Shark Tale, to make the title sound less violent and more family friendly. Bill Damaschke, the producer of the film, explained the change of the title: "We set out to make a movie a little more noir, perhaps a little darker than where we've landed." In April 2002, production officially began.

The film was produced concurrently with Finding Nemo, another animated film set underwater, which was released a year and a half before Shark Tale. DreamWorks Animation's CEO, Jeffrey Katzenberg, defended the film, saying that "any similarities are mere coincidence. We've been open with the Pixar people, so we don't step on each other's toes."

Release

The Piazza San Marco in Venice a day before the film's world premiere, where it was projected on the world's largest inflatable movie screen.

Shark Tale was originally scheduled to be released on November 5, 2004, but was moved up to October 1, 2004 in order to avoid competition with Disney/Pixar's The Incredibles. The film had its worldwide premiere on September 10, 2004 in Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy. Screening as part of the Venice Film Festival, it marked the first time that Piazza San Marco was closed for a premiere of a major feature film. The film was projected on the largest inflatable screen in the world, measuring more than six stories tall and over 3,900 square feet (360 m²). It required 20,000 cubic feet (570 m³) of air to inflate and more than 50 tons of water for stabilization. The premiere was attended by 6,000 visitors, including Will Smith, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, and Michael Imperioli. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the executive producer of the film, explained that they "wanted to find a unique way to introduce this movie to the world. We needed a big idea. … More than anything, we are in showbusiness. This is the show part."

Home media

Shark Tale was released on DVD and VHS on February 8, 2005, accompanied with a DVD-exclusive animated short film Club Oscar. The three-and-a-half-minute short film continues where the main film ends, showing the characters of Shark Tale dancing at the whale wash to a spoof of Saturday Night Fever. It was also released on Game Boy Advance Video in October 2005. The film was released on Blu-ray on February 5, 2019.

Club Oscar

Club Oscar is a five-minute computer-animated film included as a bonus feature on the DVD and VHS releases of Shark Tale and is set after the movie. In the short, the Whale Wash turns into a party club.

Reception

Box office

Shark Tale opened at #1 with $47.6 million, which was, at the time, the second-highest opening for a DreamWorks Animation film behind Shrek 2 ($108 million). It remained the #1 film in the U.S. and Canada for its second and third weekends.

Overall, it grossed $160,861,908 in North America and $206,413,111 internationally, bringing its worldwide total to $367,275,019.

Critical reception

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 36% based on 183 reviews, with an average rating of 5.15/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "Derivative and full of pop culture in-jokes." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 48 out of 100 based on 36 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert gave Shark Tale two out of four stars, observing, "Since the target audience for Shark Tale is presumably kids and younger teenagers, how many of them have seen the R-rated Godfather and will get all the inside jokes? Not a few, I suppose, and some of its characters and dialogue have passed into common knowledge. But it's strange that a kid-oriented film would be based on parody of a 1972 gangster movie for adults." He also opined that younger viewers would have trouble enjoying a film about adult characters with adult problems, such as an elaborate love triangle and a main character wanting to clear his debt with loan sharks, and compared it to more successful fish-focused animated features like Pixar Animation Studios' Finding Nemo, which Ebert felt featured a simpler plot that audiences could more easily identify with. Richard Roeper commented that although the film was not on the same level as Finding Nemo, it was a film worth seeing.

Todd McCarthy of Variety was critical of the film's lack of originality: "Overfamiliarity extends to the story, jokes and music, most of which reference popular entertainment of about 30 years ago" noting that the script combines The Godfather and Jaws, with a dash of Car Wash. McCarthy calls Smith's character "tiresomely familiar", and Zellweger's "entirely uninteresting", but praises the vocal performance of Martin Scorcese. Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter said the film was not as good as Shrek, but called it "an overly jokey but often quite entertaining spoof that should please families everywhere."

Social commentary

Shark Tale has received controversy for perpetuating negative stereotypes of Italian-Americans in its antagonists. Politician Bill Pascrell said: "The prevailing message is negative and they have to be held out to dry for it. I'm a very proud Italian-American. When you stereotype me, it's like making fun of my grandparents". Dona De Sanctis, deputy executive director of the Order Sons of Italy in America, said: "We were very concerned about this type of stereotyping being passed on to another generation of children. John Mancini, the founder of the Italic Institute of America, protested the movie, stating: "We're concerned about what preteens are learning from the outside world. They don't associate other groups as criminals, they only know Italians as gangsters. Our goal here is to de-Italianize it." The protest was coordinated by the Italian American One Voice Coalition of New Jersey. DreamWorks reacted by changing the name of Peter Falk's character from Don Brizzi to Don Feinberg. However, Mancini demanded that everything Italian—character names, the mannerisms, the forms of speech—be dropped.

The American Family Association, a Christian conservative organization, raised concerns about Shark Tale, suggesting that it was designed to promote the acceptance of gay rights by children.

Accolades

Awards

Award	Category	Name	Result
Academy Awards	Academy Award for Best Animated Feature	Bill Damaschke	Nominated
Annie Awards	Annie Award for Best Animated Effects in an Animated Production	Scott Cegielski	Nominated
	Annie Award for Best Character Animation in a Feature Production	Ken Duncan	Nominated
	Annie Award for Best Character Design in an Animated Feature Production	Carlos Grangel	Nominated
	Annie Award for Production Design in an Animated Feature Production	Armand Baltazar	Nominated
		Samuel Michlap	Nominated
		Pierre-Olivier Vincent	Nominated
	Annie Award for Best Writing in an Animated Feature Production	Michael J. Wilson Rob Letterman	Nominated
BAFTA Children's Awards	Best Feature Film		Nominated
BET Comedy Awards	Best Performance in an Animated Theatrical Film	Will Smith	Nominated
Casting Society of America	Best Animated Voice-Over Feature Casting	Leslee Feldman	Won
Golden Reel Awards	Best Sound Editing in an Animated Feature Film	Richard L. Anderson Thomas Jones Wade Wilson Mark Binder Mike Chock Ralph Osborn David Williams Mark A. Mangini Slamm Andrews	Nominated
Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards	Favorite Voice from an Animated Movie	Will Smith	Won
Saturn Awards	Saturn Award for Best Animated Film		Nominated
Visual Effects Society	Outstanding Performance by an Animated Character in an Animated Motion Picture	Renée Zellweger Ken Duncan	Nominated

Soundtrack

Shark Tale: Motion Picture Soundtrack
Soundtrack album by Various artists
Released	September 21, 2004
Recorded	2004
Genre	R&B hip hop soul
Length	50:33
Label	Geffen DreamWorks Universal
Producer	Timbaland Jam & Lewis Ron Fair Missy Elliott The Underdogs Dre & Vidal The Trak StarzHans Zimmer
Singles from Shark Tale: Motion Picture Soundtrack
"Car Wash (Shark Tale Mix)" Released: August 29, 2004

Shark Tale: Motion Picture Soundtrack was released on September 21, 2004. The soundtrack features newly recorded music by various artists, including Justin Timberlake, Sean Paul, Timbaland, Christina Aguilera, JoJo, Ludacris, Mary J. Blige, and The Pussycat Dolls, as well as the film's closing theme composed by Hans Zimmer.

Janet Jackson and Beyoncé initially planned to record a duet for the film's soundtrack. Jackson's frequent collaborator Jimmy Jam, who had recently worked with Beyoncé for The Fighting Temptations soundtrack, commented, "Obviously we'd love to have the involvement of Janet and Beyonce, who we just worked with on Fighting Temptations. They've already expressed interest", adding "There are a lot of opportunities with an animated piece to work with some different people." Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, had appointed Jackson's producers Jam & Lewis to be involved with the soundtrack, though the duo only ended up producing only one song for the film, with Jam saying "We worked for DreamWorks before on the Bryan Adams song for Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and the Boyz II Men tune for The Prince of Egypt, and Katzenberg is a fan of what we do. He thought we would be perfect to do the music for Shark Tale."

No.	Title	Writer(s)	Producer(s)	Length
1.	"Three Little Birds" (Sean Paul and Ziggy Marley)	Bob Marley	Stephen Marley	3:37
2.	"Car Wash (Shark Tale Mix)" (Christina Aguilera featuring Missy Elliott)	Norman Whitfield (additional lyrics by Missy Elliott)	Missy Elliott, Ron Fair	3:50
3.	"Good Foot" (Justin Timberlake featuring Timbaland)	Timberlake, Timothy Mosley	Timbaland	3:57
4.	"Secret Love" (JoJo)	Samantha Jade, Jared Gosselin, Phillip White	White, Jared	4:00
5.	"Lies & Rumours" (D12)	DeShaun Holton, J. Rotem, Denaun Porter, O. Moore, V. Carlisle, Rufus Johnson, M. Chavarria	Denaun Porter	4:20
6.	"Got to Be Real" (Mary J. Blige featuring Will Smith)	David Foster, David Paich & Cheryl Lynn	Andre Harris, Vidal Davis	3:33
7.	"Can't Wait" (Avant)	Damon E. Thomas, Antonio Dixon, Harvey W. Mason, Eric Dawkins, Steven Russell	The Underdogs	3:44
8.	"Gold Digger" (Ludacris featuring Bobby Valentino and Lil' Fate)	Alonzo Lee, Shamar Daugherty, Christopher Bridges, Bobby Wilson, Arbie Wilson	The Trak Starz	3:47
9.	"Get It Together" (India.Arie)	Drew Ramsey, Shannon Sanders, India.Arie, Dana Johnson, Mel Johnson	India.Arie, Sanders, Ramsey	4:54
10.	"We Went as Far as We Felt Like Going" (The Pussycat Dolls)	Bob Crewe, Kenny Nolan	Ron Fair	3:51
11.	"Digits" (Fan 3)	Allison Lurie, Paul Robb, David Clayton-Thomas, Fred Lipsius	BitCrusher	3:41
12.	"Sweet Kind of Life" (Cheryl Lynn)	James Harris III, Terry Lewis, Cheryl Lynn, Bobby Ross Avila, Issiah J. Avila, Tony Tolbert, James Q. Wright	Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis	3:59
13.	"Some of My Best Friends Are Sharks" (Hans Zimmer)	Hans Zimmer	Hans Zimmer	3:25
Total length:				50:33

Charts

Chart (2004)	Peak position
U.S. Billboard 200	34
U.S. Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums	48

Video game

Main article: Shark Tale (video game)

A video game based on the film was released on September 29, 2004 for Microsoft Windows, Xbox, GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Game Boy Advance. Published by Activision, Edge of Reality developed the console versions of the game, while Vicarious Visions developed the Game Boy Advance version, and Amaze Entertainment developed the Microsoft Windows version. The cast from the film did not reprise their roles in the game.

Cancelled sequel

In April 2011, DreamWorks Animation's CEO, Jeffrey Katzenberg, commented that the studio did not have plans to produce future movie genre parodies like Shark Tale, Monsters vs. Aliens, and Megamind, saying that these films "all shared an approach and tone and idea of parody, and did not travel well internationally. We don't have anything like that coming on our schedule now."

External links

• Official website
• Official website
• Shark Tale at IMDb
• Template:Bcdb title
• Shark Tale at AllMovie