The Reef (DVD)

...Pi has to relocate to the reef where he meets beautiful Cordelia. But shark bully Troy also has his eye on her and will go to any lengths to get her. Soon Pi finds himself in the unenviable position of having to protect the girl and the entire reef. Luckily there’s a venerable old turtle on hand to help.

Computer-generated animation has come a long way in the past ten years, but you wouldn’t know it to look at this shoddy pile of drivel. ...
...it, the quality is so appalling. Most of the animation was farmed out to a studio in South Korea, where it is cheaper and quicker to produce. Now that may be a bonus when you’re making something like “The Simpsons”, where time is of the essence so your topical gags still work and you’re only working in traditional cel animation. But you’re at a distinct disadvantage if you’re hoping to compete in a crowded market where Pixar and Dreamworks are the ... more

After his parents are scooped up by a net, young fish Pi has to relocate to the reef where he meets beautiful Cordelia. But shark bully Troy also has his eye on her and will go to any lengths to get her. Soon Pi finds himself in the unenviable position of having to protect the girl and the entire reef. Luckily there’s a venerable old turtle on hand to help.

Computer-generated animation has come a long way in the past ten years, but you wouldn’t know it to look at this shoddy pile of drivel. It’s hard to believe there were three directors working on it, the quality is so appalling. Most of the animation was farmed out to a studio in South Korea, where it is cheaper and quicker to produce. Now that may be a bonus when you’re making something like “The Simpsons”, where time is of the essence so your topical gags still work and you’re only working in traditional cel animation. But you’re at a distinct disadvantage if you’re hoping to compete in a crowded market where Pixar and Dreamworks are the industry standards. There’s none of the detail we’ve come to associate with CGI; characters appear to float on top of their backgrounds instead of interacting with their surroundings (which look like they’ve been borrowed from 70s cartoon “The Snorks”). The backdrops don’t look three-dimensional, more like painted mattes and they lack range in terms of textures. The only aspect that is anywhere near photo-realistic is the water’s surface when seen from above, but that isn’t very often. There are a few attempts to add some semblance of truth to the underwater scenes, by adding waterborne particles, but these only show up intermittently.

There’s a distinct lack of character texture and detail – they may be fish but you can’t see their scales, they don’t appear to belong to any specific species and there’s no sense of weight or musculature to them. They also have large, forward pointing human eyes, teeth and what appear to be eyebrows, so don’t look that much like fish anyway. Their movement is spongy and they have restricted mouth mobility so it appears they are made out of rubber and robs them of expression. It often feels like there’s too much gravity – when items fall, they don’t drift or sway, they just go straight down, so they don’t act like they should underwater. The scale is off by a mile; ordinary Pisceans and porpoises seem to be the same size, yet sharks are much bigger. And there’s also the small matter of the creatures being able to breathe out of water. The directors are useless at pacing the movie; there’s virtually no preamble, so we don’t get to know Pi or his family before his parents are snatched away and so don’t care when they are. They seem to think that having action sequences in slow-motion makes them exciting, when they really just make them slower and less interesting. They don’t know how to frame a joke and either let punch-lines linger or just reuse gags even if they weren’t funny in the first place. You know it’s bad when an under-five doesn’t laugh at a fart gag. If you’re an adult, you’ll be either fast asleep or tearing your hair out at the sheer awfulness of the move after the first five minutes.

The screenplay by Chris Denk, Anurag Mehta and Timothy Wayne Peternel is an abomination that has hastily been tacked together from off-cuts of “A Shark’s Tale” and “Finidng Nemo”. It’s a mess of abortive subplots that has no strong through line. We go from Pi losing his parents to living with porpoises, travelling to the reef, growing up in the blink of an eye, moving in with his “crazy” aunt, falling in love, taking on the local bully, hooking up with a Mr Miyagi-style turtle and saving the day through a hackneyed and entirely unnecessary manner. If there’s a cliché to be had, the writers cling to it like limpets. And there’s barely enough story to fill the slim seventy-seven minute running time.

There’s nothing you could call character development. Pi is a boring heroic archetype, Cordelia is a pointless damsel in distress, Troy is a two-dimensional bully, Aunt Pearl is only considered crazy because she wears a clamshell and starfish on her head and Nerissa the turtle is a clichéd grumpy but caring old mentor figure. Anyone else that appears is a one-joke character, usually based on exaggerated racial stereotypes or fart gags. The script is so un-thrilling and un-funny that when I saw it a dozen-strong group of under-sixes were silent throughout, presumably because they’d been bored into submission by it. There isn’t a single decent one-liner to be had and you know that the random creatures from the reef will band together in predictable fashion come the end, Pi will get the girl and Troy will get his comeuppance. There, now I’ve saved you the trouble of watching it.

The voice cast throughout is extremely lax. Both Freddie Prinze Jr and Evan Rachel Wood sound positively bored as the voices of Pi and Cordelia. There’s not even a semblance of personality in their efforts. In fact there aren’t enough voices to go round. It’s a sad day when you have to rely on Rob Schneider to play several characters. And convinced though I’m sure he is of his own talents, his voice doesn’t have anywhere near enough range to convince in one, let alone several parts. He essentially does a bad job of various impressions (Edward G Robinson, Christopher Walken, Emilio Estevez) and expects you to buy into them. But at least he isn’t as all-out irritating as nasal New Yorker Fran Drescher, who veritably squeaks her lines through her nose as “mad” Aunt Pearl. And the less said about the dreadful vocal stereotypes of the French, Chinese, English and Indians the better. At least John Rhys-Davies camps it up as rhyming storytelling walrus Thornton. But it’s a waste of his talents and effort.

The music by Christopher Lennertz could be described as derivative at best. Basically every time the reef appears, he throws in some more steel drums. You keep expecting Sebastian from “The Little Mermaid” to appear and start a chorus of “Under the Sea”. Playful woodwinds are used for the porpoises, so you become even more convinced they are poorly drawn dolphins, sick-trigger syrupy strings turn up with Cordelia and just because he has a slight Texan accent, Nerissa is preceded by western guitar motifs and reedy flutes. The loss of Pi’s parents is replete with sad harps and chimes and the training montages are accompanied by predictable rock guitar. It doesn’t work as a soundtrack because it is too fragmented.

“The Reef” us a truly dreadful film with no redeeming features. The direction is incompetent, the writing abominably derivative, the vocal performances limp and the animation of the poorest quality I have seen in some time. Unless your kids have set fire to the living room or put the cat in the washing machine, don’t punish them with this abysmal piece of tat. It’s a complete waste of pixels and everybody’s time. 

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