Starring: Will Smith (I), Robert De Niro, Renée Zellweger, Angelina Jolie

2 out of 10 stars

Poor Richard said that "Fish and visitors stink in three days." Dreamworks Animation's Shark Tale stinks in three minutes and keeps on stinking. Fortunately, the memory of it fades almost immediately, though you may have to burn candles in your car on the way home, just to get it out of your clothes. Poor Richard? Poor us!

The whole thing is a whale of an embarrassment to everyone involved. And, with the voice talent assembled here, just about everyone in Hollywood IS involved. Will Smith, Renee Zellweger, Angelina Jolie, Robert De Niro, and Jack Black all lend their voices to various sea creatures, kind of celebrity sushi. But there is no wasabi in Shark Tale. Hell, there isn't even any soy sauce.

Last year, when Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith co-presented at the Academy Awards I thought I detected a bit of marital strife. As Smith waxed on about how cool it was to be presenting with his beautiful wife she seemed to be perturbed at best. "Wow, if she can't contain it onstage in front of millions of people, she must really hear this kind of stuff a lot at home," I thought. If Will Smith is even one-sixteenth as persistent, hyper, and annoying as his character, Oscar in this movie, my heart goes out to that woman.

One has to go back to Disney's offering from 2000, The Emperor's New Groove, and David Spade's whiny llama, to find a lead animated character more grating than Oscar (Woody Allen's ant, Zee, in Antz from 1998, would be next in line).

Oscar is a slacker employee of Whale Wash, a whale cleaning station. He dreams of becoming a celebrity (the first of many painful L.A.-themes in this thing), making lots of money, and living in a penthouse. He's constantly late and Angie (Zellweger), a co-worker with a crush on him, is constantly covering up his absences. He's also in debt to his boss, a puffer fish named Sykes (Martin Scorsese -- stick to making up New York history, Marty). Sykes eventually resorts to having his henchman, two Rastafarian jellyfish, tie Oscar up to torture him. Meanwhile, (this is the kind of animated movie that needs a "meanwhile" instead of being a seamless narrative), in the hull of the "Titanic" reside the sharks, a thinly, thinly veiled Mafioso group, led by Don Lino (De Niro). He has two sons: one is Frankie (Michael Imperioli, Christopher from The Sopranos), the other is Lenny (voiced, for no apparent reason, by Jack Black). Lenny is a vegetarian and more than a little fey. On an excursion to teach Lenny how to be a real shark and eat some fish, he and Frankie discover the bound-and-gagged Oscar. Lenny can't bring himself to do the deed and so Frankie rushes in, jaws open. But Frankie is killed in a freak accident by a dropping boat anchor. When the sand settles, Frankie is dead, Lenny is in cahoots with Oscar and Oscar is assumed to be a fearsome shark-killer, propelling him to a world of money and fame.

Just who, exactly, thought that all family entertainment was missing was a good mob spoof? Just who, exactly, thought we needed another pop parody with even more references to infortainment (there's a running Katie Couric bit throughout), L.A., agents, gold diggers, and movie stars ("Mussell Crowe" and "Jessica Shrimpson" have stars on the walk of fame—isn't that clever)?

Apparently, Jeffrey Katzenberg did.

Katzenberg once boasted that recreating Walt Disney's magic was surprisingly simple, that Walt had a definite template for a successful animated feature. "He left breadcrumbs the size of Volkswagens," the DreamWorks titan has been fond of saying. But with the erratic output of the studio (The Road to El Dorado, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, the aforementioned Antz) one has to wonder if Katzenberg didn't follow Walt's obvious trail as much as carefully shadowing the creators of Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, shouting "Eureka!" louder than they did and standing in front of them on the front porch, once they'd gotten home.

The trailer for DreamWorks 2005 feature, Madagascar looks to be more of the same; another pop parody. I'd rather hoped the company had gotten it out of their system with Father of the Pride, but I guess not. Maybe that's one good reason to root for the crappy NBC show; it could serve as a shunt for DreamWorks's need to inject pop references in everything they do. Go, "Father of the Pride," go!