This movie might look like it is a story driven adventure designed to entertain your kids, but in fact it is a painfully boring educational video. The video starts with some of the worst CGI you will ever see, followed by a blank title card on the movie. You will then hear the narrator try to ham out some uninspired plot line while the music blares over him. The first thing you will notice is how lazy the animation is. CGI models stapled onto real ocean footage. You can even see it in the trailer. Then you get to meet the characters. A know-it-all angler fish named Cleo, a puffer fish whose only role is to follow everyone around, and a manta ray named Crash who is voiced by the director. We are given the Mcguffin for the story, a bizarrely malformed creature that swims in a nightmarish manner, it is called...Ollie. It gets chased by sharks, and now the trio must save it.
This is where you would expect the story to begin, where the characters begin to experience conflicts, adventure, transformations of character, on a path of discovery on their journey. What you get, however, is an endless stream of extremely formulaic educational fish facts that are pandered in such a way that it is neither engaging nor is it entertaining. It goes like this: Characters name a new fish, then they say some trite catch-phrase like "That's awesome" "That's so cool" "You are so smart" , then the know-it-all Cleo drones out fish facts until the next sea creature we see. This goes on...for a very long time. Only stopping for a minute when they go to a different area of the sea to talk about the next series of sea creatures in the exact same way. For the next hour this will be your reality, and that of your children. The ending is solved in the most tiresome of ways. The plot is almost non existent. It becomes painfully clear that it is an inane device meant to keep the children interested.
However at least in my experience, it fails at keeping the viewer interested. If you are a parent, you will not find any value from this, for you or your child. I am giving it a 3, primarily because it was so awful and boring that you begin to think up better ways to create a similar story. So on the one hand, it does help you become more imaginative. Simply by trying to create something...out of nothing.
This is where you would expect the story to begin, where the characters begin to experience conflicts, adventure, transformations of character, on a path of discovery on their journey. What you get, however, is an endless stream of extremely formulaic educational fish facts that are pandered in such a way that it is neither engaging nor is it entertaining. It goes like this: Characters name a new fish, then they say some trite catch-phrase like "That's awesome" "That's so cool" "You are so smart" , then the know-it-all Cleo drones out fish facts until the next sea creature we see. This goes on...for a very long time. Only stopping for a minute when they go to a different area of the sea to talk about the next series of sea creatures in the exact same way. For the next hour this will be your reality, and that of your children. The ending is solved in the most tiresome of ways. The plot is almost non existent. It becomes painfully clear that it is an inane device meant to keep the children interested.
However at least in my experience, it fails at keeping the viewer interested. If you are a parent, you will not find any value from this, for you or your child. I am giving it a 3, primarily because it was so awful and boring that you begin to think up better ways to create a similar story. So on the one hand, it does help you become more imaginative. Simply by trying to create something...out of nothing.
