THIS FISH IS FOUL

REVIEWED - SHARK TALE: Though Ice Age wasn't great and A Bug's Life was only OK, Dreamworks' unsuccessful attempt to find comedy in the interactions of crudely anthropomorphised aquatic fauna (something here sounds oddly familiar, doesn't it?) may be the first properly lousy computer-generated feature to emerge from a major studio to date.

The jokes are hopeless, the story is a shambles and the artwork, rendered in the sickly colours of cheap paste jewellery, accidentally achieves the ugliness of those 1970s Czechoslovakian cartoons concerning the death of the soul. Fish are what Shark Tale concerns and fish is what it smells of.

When Oscar (voiced by Will Smith), a cheeky, yellow - though culturally black - whale-wash employee, accidentally happens upon a shark that has been killed by a falling anchor, the other fish on his reef assume that he slew the unfortunate beast and he becomes a lavishly rewarded superstar. Meanwhile he makes friends with the dead animal's amiable brother, Lenny (Jack Black), who, working through an enormously strained analogy which I won't bother clarifying, cannot quite bring himself to tell his mobster dad (Robert De Niro) that he is a sensitive, artistically minded vegetarian. Just as Oscar is settling into his suave penthouse, news reaches him that associates of Lenny's family have been spotted on the outskirts of town. The shark slayer is expected to step up.

There is plenty to worry us here. As is often the case in such affairs, nobody has solved the dilemma of how to comfortably incorporate the unavoidable brutalities of nature into a story involving species on adjacent rungs of the food chain: if the sharks do stop eating Oscar's friends will they starve or just begin terrorising a neighbouring reef? Another thing: why, exactly, is it acceptable for Will Smith the fish to fall in love with a similarly piscine Renée Zellweger when Hollywood still seems so sensitive about miscegenation between fleshy humans? And if the jellyfish are all Rastafarians and the sharks are all Italian-Americans, where are the whales from? Or the lobsters, for that matter?

The truth is that none of this would matter if the film looked a little less horrid or was a tiny bit funnier. With the relevant voice talents' faces plastered inelegantly onto wispy little bodies, the fish bear an uncomfortable similarity to those in Monty Python's Meaning of Life. And, though the notion of bringing Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese together as, respectively, menacing shark and irascible puffer-fish sounds amusing, the unimpressive reality suggests that it might have better remained just that: a notion.

Of course, De Niro and Scorsese did it for (sigh) the kids, and I suppose some duller children might enjoy the picture. But one of the great joys of the current generation of computer-generated features is that they have tended to appeal to all age groups. Is it my imagination or did another studio prove this recently with a much better film set in a similar environment to Shark Tale's? What was its name again?