Shark Tale: The Trash Era of Dreamworks | Big Joel
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Channel: Big Joel
Views: 1,439,341
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Shark Tale, Dreamworks, Trash era of dreamworks, shrek, shark tale analysis, shark tale video essay, over the hedge, bee movie, analysis, big joel, big joel shark tale, big joel dreamworks, trash era, big joel analysis, oscar, will smith
Id: GASoFrUIqDM
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 29min 31sec (1771 seconds)
Published: Sun Oct 14 2018
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Okay I just finished this video essay and it was...... not good? Like a C overall.
Big Joel starts out with a weird unframed discussion of Shark's place in society before finally giving an introduction to the video at 2 minutes in. Then he introduces the video as a way to look at Dreamworks' movies in the 2004-07 era (a sentiment which is echoed in the title of the video). At this point you think the video is going to be about Shark Tale in the context of other Dreamworks movies.
Part One finally starts at 3-and-a-half minutes in and Joel talks for Shrek for 6 minutes with only a couple of references to Shark Tale, which is, you know, the movie the video is actually about. So now instead of the video purporting to put Shark Tale in the context of Dreamworks overall catalog at the time, which included four other films on top of Shrek, the video seems to be shifting to being a discussion about the similarities and failings of Shark Tale when compared to Shrek.
But for the rest of the video there are only a few actual comparisons of these films, primarily in the way the movies deal with essentialism.
The middle third of the movie is pretty rambly and I was never sure what Joel was actually trying to get at. His point mainly seems to be that the movie is flawed since the final conclusion of the movie is that Oscar learns to be happy with his place in society rather than looking at how society's implicit essentialism (i.e. Oscar is at the bottom of the food chain and nature deems that he should stay there) is harmful to most of the fish in this society.
While I'm not going to say Shark Tale is a great, or even a good movie, by any means, Joel seems to have missed the point entirely. Joel says that Oscar's character arc makes any societal critique a nonstarter. But the point I got from the movie was that society should never have made Oscar feel like a lesser participant just because he doesn't have a flashy job, paralleled with how it's obvious that Don Lino should never have made his son feel like a lesser shark just because he's not a "real shark". The real character arc that matters in Don Lino's, who represents society at large and its views towards essentialism. At the end of the movie Don Lino comes around and respects his son (and through him, the rest of society) for who they are, who they choose to be, and what they enjoy doing.
Finally Joel gets hung up on the sharks eaten shrimp thing and seems to say that the movie should have spent more time showing this to be the atrocity that it is as if this particular joke, which is obviously meant to immediately frame the sharks as cruel oppressive elites of society, should have been discussed through the film as more than a framing device.
Again, it's not a bad video essay but it also seems really unfocused and I think Joel's conclusion about the movies flaws don't really hold water (heh).
As a more nitpicky note (if Joel actually reads this): buy some cheap soundproofing foam for the room where you record your voiceovers. Killing that reverb will go a long way in upping technical quality of your videos. Also turn off autofocus on your camera because it likes to unfocus/refocus on your face, focus it once, throw it on manual and leave it there.
"we cool?", "yeah we cool" - peak centrism right there
I just started the vid and I'm really excited for this mini-series, even though I've never really watched Big Joel before. Dreamworks is fascinating because all of their films either become billion-dollar multi-part franchises, or are these weird one offs that become lost in the culture, only to be resurrected years later for their ironic potential. Mid-2000's one offs like Shark Tale and Bee Movie are irony kings at this point, but I feel in 10 years we'll see similar treatment for some of their later forgotten films, like Turbo or Home or Megamind (the greatest film of all time.)
I am part of a youtube channel that Let's Plays Dreamworks games to their completion (which I won't link here, because my stupid little dozen-subscriber channel is deffo not Breadtube-worthy) and its always the forgotten movies that have the most absurd gameplay. For example, within the five(!!!!!!!!!) distinct video games for Over The Hedge, you have a God of War-stye action-adventure, a Metal Gear Solid-inspired stealth game, and a GOLF SIM. All for Over the Hedge, a movie NOBODY gives a fuck about.
Back to Big Joel- What are his most worthwhile vids to check out? I've seen some of the God's Not Dead ones, but didn't take too much away from them because I already had the misfortune of having seen the films.
Shark Tale was great wtf
Wadsworth constant applies here, skip to 9:50 to miss the preamble and actually get to the part about Shark Tale.