The Sea Beast (2022)
The Sea Beast, the new film from Sony Pictures Imageworks dropping onto Netflix, is almost as straightforward as its title. It’s an adventure yarn of sailing ships and marine monsters, written and directed by Chris Williams stepping beyond Disney, where he co-directed Big Hero 6 and Moana.
The Sea Beast is made to similar standards (I caught it on a limited UK cinema release before its Netflix bow), but unlike most Hollywood cartoons, it foregrounds the adventure as much as the characters. The film has one song, a sea-shanty, that’s part of diegetic revels. There’s no princess. The story has a twist, but it’s not a robot or a pop singer to threaten the fourth wall.
It’s technically set in a fantasy world, but it feels like a
period adventure. That’s something else unusual for a Hollywood cartoon, at
least since the flop of Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire twenty years
ago. As a nautical adventure, Sea Beast also prompts memories of an even
bigger flop of that time, Treasure Planet. Yet those films had extra
hooks – the graphic design of Mike Mignola on Atlantis, Treasure
Planet’s space-fantasy – that Sea Beast eschews, and its confidence does it
credit.
In the first act, the story feels like a fantastical take on
Moby Dick with nods to the third act of Jaws (the hunt on the
sea). The ocean is full of gigantic monsters which regularly sink sailing
ships; a brief prologue shows a lone boy surviving such a wreck. He grows up
into Jacob, an elite “Hunter” sworn to slay such Beasts till he dies,
voiced by a well-placed Karl Urban (who plays another hunter in the
gory anti-superhero show, The Boys).
He and his comrades crew the
good ship Inevitable under the scarred, towering Captain Crow,
who’s stern but with good humour beneath. There’s a touching early scene
between Jacob and Crow in the captain’s cabin, where Crow makes clear he sees
Jacob as his heir. Crow’s voiced by Jared Harris (Mad Men) who’s
London-born, but his voice here sounds pleasantly like the immortal
Brian Glover.
Unsurprisingly, Crow also has overtones of
Quint from Jaws, especially in commanding a dramatic ship battle with a
monster in the first minutes. It deftly sets out the film’s stall. The fight
is tremendous and exciting, with much leaping and climbing and falling as the
human crew take on a sea creature as big as their ship. After taking damage,
the Inevitable returns to land, where Jacob encounters a stranger. She’s a
little black girl called Maisie (British actress
Zaris-Angel Hator) who’s run away from her orphanage – her parents were
Hunters like Jacob who went down with their ship. Maisie has devoured accounts
of the Inevitable’s exploits, and Jacob’s especially, and she’s set on joining
their crew.
Jacob sends her packing, but she’ll pop back up soon. The
Inevitable sets out again, this time with competition from the Royal Navy, and
Crow determined to slay the Red Bluster, the most feared sea beast of all. The
stowaway Maisie reveals herself to Crow’s amusement and Jacob’s dismay, and
the hunt begins. But when ship and Beast meet, Crow and Maisie will find
themselves separated from their crewmates, and deflected into a different kind
of story.
Twenty years ago, I remember waiting for Disney’s
terrific-sounding Atlantis and Treasure Planet with more anticipation than I
had for Spider-Man or Lord of the Rings. Compared to either Disney, Sea
Beast is better simply as a story. If Disney had made Sea Beast in traditional
animation around 2001, it would have knocked me out. And even in CGI, it has
one of the great virtues of trad animation – some really expressive character
acting, especially from the adorable Maisie. It’s obvious from her first
meeting with Jacob, this girl pestering him full of confidence and excitement
– all excellent animation, with no large-scale action to distract. The
hard-bitten Crow has some fine expressions too.
I’d have loved Sea Beast twenty years ago, and many viewers will
still love it. For me, its biggest problem is tied up with another CG film
from another Hollywood studio, but that involves spoiling more of the
story (proceed with caution).
After they’ve been separated from the other characters,
Maisie and Jacob discover that the Red Bluster and the other sea creatures are
naturally non-violent and intelligent. At least Maisie learns this quickly;
Jacob takes far longer to come round to the idea. And almost at once, Sea
Beast starts feeling like a film from twelve years ago – DreamWorks’
original How To Train Your Dragon. That’s a problem, because Dragon
told the story so much better.
One of the main achievements of
DreamWorks’ film was to sell the title dragon, Toothless, as a real
animal, smart, inquisitive and playful. In The Sea Beast, the Red Bluster is
just as much an animal, only its actions towards humans aren’t believable in
the film’s own framework. The Beast acts in ways that no injured, scared
creature would ever act towards people who are still clear threats. There’s no
sense of the gradual human-animal bonding that Dragon showed so carefully,
influenced in turn by a live-action classic, The Black Stallion.
It hardly helps that, as other reviewers have noted, the Bluster
(soon named Red) looks obviously like Toothless, only far more outsized
and ungainly. The only time I liked how it looks is when Red takes to land and
looks over a hill at its foes, in what looks like an homage to Godzilla’s
first scene in 1954 (at the start of this
clip). At least the
scale of Red and the other creatures allows for great physical routines, as
Maisie and Jacob swing haplessly on ropes or slide from one side of a
monster’s back to the other.
But the later scenes felt slow,
though it’s hard to tell how much I was chafing at their familiar trajectory.
(The first act’s scenes between Jacob and Crow, and Jacob meeting Maisie, play
leisurely too, but they’re much more interesting.) Objectively, The Sea Beast
is long; at 115 minutes, it’s less substantial than, for example, Moana, which
ran two minutes less with songs. There’s a particular subplot which feels
surplus, with Captain Crow seeking out an “ultimate” weapon against the
Bluster from a witch-like woman. It could have easily been dropped – indeed,
it dilutes the focus on Crow’s obsessed mindset.
From the start of
act two, Maisie sees that the creatures are benign, while Jacob stays
prejudiced, showing a boorish side that was hardly hinted previously.
Dramatically, all this is tedious. How To Train Your Dragon was equally clear
on the youngster character (Hiccup) being right and the adults wrong,
but it made an ironic fulcrum of the boy who can communicate with a dragon but
not his own human father.
Joke name apart, Hiccup felt believable, while Maisie always seems
a script mouthpiece. It would have been different if had she been sympathetic
to nature and the sea beasts from the start, something like
Miyazaki’s Nausicaa. It’s her sudden switch to savant that’s so hard to
buy; like Red, she’s failed by the film’s framework.
But for some
viewers, maybe it’s justified by the conclusion, which sees the child
literally shouting truth to adult power in a bid to change the world. It’s the
closest I’ve seen to an appearance by Greta Thunberg in an animated feature.
It may speak to youngsters frightened for the planet, much as Frozen’s Elsa
sang to youngsters in their cyber-kingdoms of isolation. That’s not even
mentioning Maisie’s blackness – though it was the film’s other major black
character, a first mate voiced by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who had me cheering
when she changes her mind with fewer words and better timing.
As a
footnote, it’s amusing that the film drops on Netflix shortly after the third
season of the anthology Love, Death and Robots. That has its own grisly
“ships and sea monsters” CG yarn, a story called
Bad Travelling directed by no less than David Fincher in his
animation debut. Its monster speaks after a fashion, but friending it isn’t an
option.
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