On July 8, Netflix premiered the major animated film 'The Sea Beast' from former Disney director Chris Williams. The Oscar winner for 'Big Hero 6' finally made the project he had long wanted, but at what cost…
In 2018, Chris Williams left Disney (where he directed the animated films 'Bolt', 'Big Hero 6', and 'Moana') and began working with Netflix. His first planned project was immediately his 'dream project'. The director had long wanted to 'revive classic adventure stories' in the spirit of Jules Verne, and the streaming service helped him realize this idea, giving him carte blanche on creative decisions. Thus, 'The Sea Beast' was born — the eighth feature-length animated film from Netflix Animation, which debuted with the magnificent 'Klaus' in 2019.
What's the Plot?
The events of the animated film 'The Sea Beast' take place in a world where the salty waters are inhabited by enormous sea monsters, which hunters heroically fight. One day, the legendary Captain Crow comes across a boy named Jacob Holland floating among the wreckage of a sunken ship. The captain takes the boy aboard his vessel, the 'Inevitable', and over time, Jacob becomes a gifted hunter and the captain's heir.
During another expedition to pursue the terrible monster that cost Captain Crow his eye, the crew of the 'Inevitable' is forced to abandon their mission and help hunters who are in trouble. Their fellow craftsmen are rescued, but the crew returns to the kingdom with slightly different prey than planned. The monarchs are displeased with the expedition's results, so they declare that they no longer need the hunters' services. They claim the profession has become obsolete due to the construction of an incredibly powerful ship, the 'Imperator', capable of replacing the fleet of mercenaries.
Hearing such insolence, Captain Crow snaps and is ready to use his pistol, but the level-headed Jacob proposes a wager to the monarchs. The conditions are simple: they must catch the very monster with which the captain has a personal score to settle. If the 'Inevitable' defeats the Red Bluster, the hunters confirm their honorable reputation and their services will not be refused; if the 'Imperator' wins, the hunters retire.
The wager is made, and the crew sets off again to track down the Bluster, but out on the open sea, it is discovered that a young orphan girl, Maisie Brumble, has stowed away on board. She knows everything about the crew and the captain from her well-read favorite books. The girl dreams of following in the footsteps of her deceased parents and becoming a sea monster hunter, but during the journey, it will be revealed that people know nothing about sea monsters…
The Sea is Troubled, Part One
It should be noted right away that the plot of 'The Sea Beast' is not brimming with originality. Not only is it made according to the well-worn template of 'original adventures', but inspiration from the animated film 'How to Train Your Dragon' and the book 'Moby Dick' is immediately recognizable. This is understandable, because the director immediately outlined his task: to make a film in the spirit of classic adventure. But for this, you either need to offer viewers something new within the genre, or find some interesting ways to present a familiar story in a fresh way. Or, a third option – to saturate the film with a longing for the past, stuff it with famous quotes, and present it to the viewer as a nostalgic opus in modern conditions (and hey, it worked out well for <em>Spider-Man: No Way Home</em>). Unfortunately, 'The Sea Beast' fails on all three counts.
On December 15, 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' was released, the main Marvel blockbuster this year. The most anticipated project of winter. The most large-scale Spider-Man film. The most, most
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And not only is Chris Williams' work banal and derivative, but it is also teeming with rather dubious moments throughout its two-hour runtime. For instance, Captain Crow's desire for revenge against the Red Bluster is so great that he is ready to compromise the hunters' code and abandon the crew to death, much like Captain Ahab. However, it is completely unclear how long the enmity between Crow and the Bluster has been going on. If the crew of the 'Inevitable' has been searching for the monster for many years to exact vengeance, how were they able to track it down twice in a very short period of time?
Or, for example, why did the royal family suddenly decide to abandon the services of hunters, who had been perfecting their craft for hundreds of years? 'We just built a big ship for the first time in many years, and therefore we no longer need you.' It seems a bit arrogant and illogical, don't you think? And 'The Sea Beast' is full of such oddities. It will become obvious that the sea monsters are the victims in this war with humans. People unjustly oppress and kill them, who live peacefully in the blue depths. And the 'king of monsters', the Red Bluster, will spontaneously (or rather, she herself) decide to show Jacob and Maisie that monsters are not as bad as the books make them out to be.
Like the Goblet of Fire, the Red one chose two 'random' people to demonstrate the monsters' kindness. And, imagine that, these people turned out to be from the very ship where all crew members want her dead more than anything in the world. It was the 'Inevitable' that escaped being rammed and sunk (another ship in the film was less fortunate) by the most ferocious monster in these waters.
A comparison with 'How to Train Your Dragon' is inevitable, where Hiccup was the initiator of the friendship. After years of war, the dragons were obviously aggressive, and that is logical, but the first step from a monster exhausted and embittered by battles seems implausible.
The Sea is Troubled, Part Two
As for the characters, 'The Sea Beast' includes the usual archetypes: a talented, handsome hunter, a defenseless, weak child capable of opening people's eyes to certain things, arrogant and conceited monarchs, an adorable little creature, and so on. Has the viewer never seen anything like this? Of course they have, and repeatedly, but in many projects, the archetypes have their own individual character, background, and clearly defined motivation. In Chris Williams' creation, the characters are not memorable, except perhaps for Blue (that super cute little monster, but his function, excuse me, is simply to be a cool and funny sidekick) and Maisie.
Most events in the film happen only because the creators and Williams need them to, so the characters do not seem independent. The captain is ready to shoot his 'son' because he didn't let the entire crew and ship drown, even though just a couple of days earlier, Crow proudly told Jacob that he was declaring him his successor and heir. After the Red one's kidnapping stunt, the captain, for the sake of revenge, despite the crew's objections and warnings, decides to turn to an evil witch for help, the price of which is the lives of the entire crew. By the way, the aforementioned witch will simply disappear in the end: she will give the weapon to Crow and vanish, as if she was never in the film. She will not come for any payment. She just made a little gift for the legendary captain, as an exception.
As a result, in the chaos of the narrative, 'The Sea Beast' doesn't even present a coherent antagonist. At first, it seems to be the Red Bluster, then the revenge-obsessed Captain Crow, then a sinister witch appears who is simply discarded, and in the end, completely different characters turn out to be the bad guys. So figure out what is happening and who is bad. The characters' motivations are either extremely banal or simply not written, making it unclear: who is fighting for what and why.
The humor in the cartoon is also very silly, and there are moments where it is clear they were made with the justification 'let the kids laugh here'. The graphics are quite decent, but a couple of times it is noticeable that the Red one looks very cheap. Either it's a hack job, or a downside of her design, which is a fusion of various animals (in my opinion, she is a hybrid of a whale, a seal, and a shark).
Overall, throughout the entire film, we are shown only 6 types of sea monsters, but one of them appears only for a moment underwater and is never shown again, and the second is a cute little monster named Blue, so we only fully get acquainted with four. And the design of each is not particularly original (besides the Red one, a large Crab appears, a creature like the Kraken, and a giant Walrus). There remains a feeling that the full potential of the vast world of sea monsters has not been realized, and the viewer was only allowed to get acquainted with a tiny fraction of the monster fauna. Too bad. A real shame.
What's the Verdict?
The eighth feature-length film from Netflix Animation loses to its direct competitors in quality. All the themes raised by Chris Williams are much better explored in projects from other animation studios. The motif of friendship with the different and living side by side with them is raised in 'Luca', the spirit of classic adventure can be provided by 'Treasure Planet', and the theme of not believing everything written or told until you personally find confirmation is, one way or another, explored in the animated film 'Up' or the same 'How to Train Your Dragon'.
For now, the debut 'Klaus' remains, perhaps, the studio's best project, and even an Oscar-winning director did not help bring Netflix's animation to a new level. 'The Sea Beast' turns out to be a very average animated film that will appeal mainly to children, unlike the universal and multi-layered cartoons from competing studios. But we hope that the 'tudum' service will not stop experimenting and will not stop allowing creators to freely create and realize their ideas, so that in the future, the streamer can become worthy competition for animation majors like Pixar/Disney and DreamWorks.
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