Reviewed - The Reef:EVERY wondered what you get from the rendered doings of fish that live off other fish? Wonder no more. The shameful laziness of the animation industry in recent years has been something to behold, but, appropriately enough for a film named after a section of the seabed, The Reef sinks to depths only previously investigated by brave men in bathyscaphes.
Half a decade ago we were blessed with the beautiful, touching Finding Nemo. Shark Tale, a lumbering, clueless Leviathon, swallowed up the Pixar picture and has, in turn, seen its effusions transformed into a film with no redeeming features bar brevity.
This ugly, witless picture follows a young fry as, orphaned by a fisherman's net, he heads for the relative paradise of a distant reef. There, his attraction to a glamour fish causes him to rub up against a shark who also has an interest in the scaly beloved. And so on and so forth.
The visuals have the broadly imagined look of preliminary designs for a marginally more interesting series of finished creations. The music is utterly horrible and all that need be said of the voice talent is that Rob Schneider is among their number. "Voice talent?" you say.
It pains me to tell you that The Reef comes from Warner Brothers, which, in the middle part of the last century, developed the most sophisticated, acerbic, endlessly charming animated characters in the history of American cinema. Now it finds itself in a similar business to the fast-food merchants and confectionary manufacturers that flog empty calories and neon-coloured nothings to blameless children. Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester and Daffy Duck must all be turning in their graves.
