Directed By Ricard Cusso and Rio Harrington

Starring – Nick Offerman, Nina Oyama, Amy Sedaris

The Plot – Living on a rundown shipwreck, Mr. Fish (Offerman) one day discovers a hyperactive young sea dragon Pip (Nina Oyama), who had mistaken his home for a junkyard while pilfering his belongings. The heated argument that ensues leaves both their houses in ruin. But there is hope. Embarking on a seemingly impossible quest in search of the mythical “Shimmer” to grant them a wish, there’s only one problem: someone else is on the hunt.

Rated PG for mild action and rude humor.

The Pout-Pout Fish – Official Movie Trailer | In Theaters Nationwide March 20

POSITIVES

For everything that The Pout-Pout Fish lacks in originality or hilarity, it attempts to make up for in vibrantly intoxicating animation of the most eye-fetching designs, enabling this big screen appeal to a world of fantastical imagination under the sea that serves as an artistic breakthrough for MIMO Studios. While the techniques aren’t quite as detailed with depth as something from Pixar or Fox Animated Studios, the boldly colorful canvases and sea life designs capture a lusciously luminating presentation made better by the highly expressive registries of its characters, allowing us ample accessibility into the tonal versatility of the product that takes its youthful audience down some surprisingly hearty avenues, particularly during its third act climax. During this section, the script attains notoriety for a deep-seeded message of community and acceptance that not only tacks on sentimental meaning to a movie that honestly feels completely forgettable to that point, but also conquers the urgency of its developed stakes with a common threat among its cultures, allowing a responsibly insightful side to the film that helped make up for its lack of consistent entertainment. Are the themes familiarly predictable? Sure, in fact an overwhelming majority of kids movies these days preach those very same values, however it’s nevertheless earned effectively here as a result of so many of the individual arcs of the script converging together for one commonality, and one whose most meaningful of scenes happens when its impact can be felt the loudest during the most defining of times. Beyond these aspects, the performance from Nick Offerman is among the very best parts of this entire experience, with his monotonously dry deliveries working so effortlessly cohesive with the lackadaisical expressions of his titular fish’s design, but surprisingly also one that doesn’t weigh down the hearty underlining of his character’s soul, in order to make him an ideal protagonist. Offerman has had plenty of experience with voice work, and that experience lends itself accordingly in the ways he continuously attacks the microphone, leading to a limitless screen presence that never sinks under the pressure of carrying a movie squarely on his shoulders, within a decorated role that he feels born to portray.

NEGATIVES

How do you take 32 pages of an original kids novel and stretch it out to make a 90-minute feature length engagement? The answer can be found in the expansion of an uninspired screenplay that takes derivativity to a whole other level, especially if you’ve ever seen another animated kids movie involving a fish tasked with saving his underwater colony from devastation. To say that this movie feels like a beat-for-beat retreading of Finding Nemo would be dramatically understating what very little creativity that the movie has going for it, but when you also factor in lifted scenes and sequences in everything from Mad Max: Fury Road, to SpongeBob SquarePants, you not only start to see how long it sat on the shelf of development before it got greenlit, but also how out of touch the writers feel with this particular audience, where even the latest SpongeBob movie underwhelmed terribly at the box office. This wouldn’t be a problem if the experience crafted a compelling story that at least kept me hooked to these characters and their respective conflicts, however it introduces a platitude of characters, the likes of which are thinly developed and agonizingly annoying with their abrasive personalities, particularly that of Oyama’s Pip, whom were forced to endure as one of our two main protagonists, and one that the movie wastes little time grating on your nerves with intrusive selfishness orchestrated to be cute, but instead coming across as irresponsible to anyone with even a shred of coherent perception. The script makes plenty of strange choices within its material, but the most unorthodox among them easily stems a secondary set of protagonists that coincide with The Pouty Fish and Pip’s mission to find this magical fish that could grant a wish to save their respective homes, with this one involving Remy Hii’s Benji, an orange cuttlefish also setting out to find the fish, in order to fuel a miracle to save his village from sea trees blocking out so much light to his family’s survival. So aside from this feeling intentionally padded, with two sets of protagonists for the price of one, it’s utilizing the stakes of the situation towards who gets to the magical fish first, with her only able to grant one wish every few years, with the problem being that we receive such skimmed over intel as proof for the proverbial pudding of these conflicts being realized in real time within the movie’s focus, and it grew tediously taxing as quickly as the movie’s opening half hour, especially with so little influence from the comedic material even registering some semblance of effort in the form of creative gags. This is where the movie gets downright dreadful, as not only is there so very little laughs throughout the entirety of the runtime, with low-hanging toilet humor and lazy puns serving as punchlines to take some of the pressure off of the performances, but also the kind of desperately hip material that feels directly written by aging adults for trendy kids, saturating it with these terribly cringy lines of the dialogue that doesn’t remain true to its literary origins, instead making this feel like every other kids movie that has come out over the last decade that didn’t have Pixar, Fox Animated Studios, or Laika attached to its production credits. When I did manage to find laughter, it came unintentionally from the design of this magical fish that so many of the characters sought out for relief, which is probably a bad way to summarize her considering she looks like a certain pocket sex toy that stunned me every time she popped back up in frame. This isn’t just the mind of a demented juvenile saying this, but I truly feel that if more people saw this movie, then there would be a similar public outrage to Sonic’s design during the original draft of Sonic The Hedgehog, but because it’s helmed by the new studio on the block, with very minimal star power attached to its ensemble, it will be forgotten as quickly as it arrived to limited theaters across the country, taking with it the single most hilarious animated design that I’ve seen since Disney used to intentionally put hidden objects in their many backdrops, proving that not even the animation here can render unanimously satisfying results…..err in the ways that was intended. Finally, the pacing for the film is dreadfully dire in a story that should accommodate urgency to its dual narrative, but can never find the meaningful momentum from scene to scene in ways that would transpire to the next. While there are plenty of examples in the first two acts that bored me to pieces throughout material conceived entirely for kids, without any adult consideration, the third act climax definitely takes the cake for its biggest blundering, where an overlong and predictable resolution is attained in a section that somehow took thirty-five minutes to properly muster. This confirms many things about the movie, but ideally how much filler it took to even reach this runtime, and considering it involves a twist surrounding their sought-after mythical being that requires a completely different approach to resolve, its final moments, while sweetly charming for the previous themes that I heralded, makes the entirety of this journey feel superfluous in the ways it alleviates these issues, where a single conversation among those involved could’ve ended this movie in ten minutes.

OVERALL
The Pout-Pout Fish is a derivatively bland and nauseatingly unfunny undertow current of familiar pieces from superior films before it, and one so emotionally flat and lifelessly unengaging that it regrettably wastes away the strongman heavy lifting from Nick Offerman to keep it afloat. While the animation is stunningly vibrant, even in lacking the depth and detail of the wonderment of the sea, the substandard script sinks its optimism behind every shamelessly shilling attempt to cater towards contemporary trends or hip lingo, serving as a psychological test of wills between unsuspecting parents who will think long and hard before allowing their children to make the movie choice again.

My Grade: 4.4 or D-