Sea Level

source: Sea Level

Love the message of preserving our oceans, but it lacks the flow and coherence of higher budget animated movies. Probably recommend for slightly older children (5+).

The plot, the animation, the colours, and the characters were good, and the ending was heart warming, best movie ever! The babies were so cute, the chickens were cool and awesome, and I especially loved the part where a little girl sees the shark running in his suit thingy.

Even though I did enjoy it Parents need to know that despite some bright, colorful animation, and a few appealing heroes, Sea Level is filled with dark images, eerie music, bullying used as humor, scarily-mutated sea creatures, an abusive human father, and characters constantly in fear for their lives. Viewers, especially young ones, will find the film's often disconnected structure and abrupt scene endings hard to follow. If Sea Level is meant as a humorous, cautionary tale about protecting the planet and its oceans, that message is as random and murky as the story itself and the few humorous sequences don't qualify it as watchable. Recommend for older children James Welch Henderson, Arkansas 1/4/2020

What first attracted me to "Sea Level" was the bamboo shark. I knew what species it was but couldn't recollect it's name. But then I watched the rest of the trailer and was really taken in by the (and I'll probably get this wrong) style or type of drawing that the animals, and humans, for that matter were drawn in. I checked out the sequel to the movie, and the style was missing, so I skipped it. The roundness, textures, and color palette added a lot to the story, and I really appreciated it. The story was adventurous and had everything from saving the innocents to saving your buddy to saving the planet. It went from deep water to tropical shores, then out to sea. It was well worth the purchase and I'm going to see if I that theme song is available on iTunes, as well. No regrets here!

Crikey! 'SeaFood' is utterly dire. I'm not going to slaughter this film (too much!), as always I have respect for anyone who creates a production as it isn't easy. With that said, this is a serious waste of 93 minutes. Awful animation, poor voice cast and an absolutely terrible premise. It may, minorly, allude to real life issues such as poaching, ocean pollution and even bullying, but it doesn't take it any further than the baseline of those things being bad. The dialogue is dreadful, not helped by the numerous awkward silent chunks created by the animation. It also doesn't know what it wants to be called either, "SeaFood" on the DVD cover but "SeeFood" on the onscreen menu. At the end it says "See" before changing to "Sea", so I guess it's intentional? Odd either way. Up there for the worst film I've seen. Not even sure the supposed target audience would enjoy this. The only (extremely) slight praise I can give is that it isn't a full-on 'Finding Nemo' rip-off, as seems the case in the opening minutes.

I was expecting Sea Level to be a cheap Finding Nemo ripoff similar to those bootleg Video Brinquedo movies, but it has a lot more effort put into it than those. The movie does have some interesting ideas, at least, but it's EXTREMELY slow. I almost fell asleep multiple times watching this, it's a huge slog up until the last 20 minutes or so. The best parts of this movie are the action sequences, they're actually pretty engaging and fun to watch. There are a lot of them towards the end of the movie, but for the first ~70% of it, you'll mostly just be watching the characters talk. This would not be an issue, except this movie's dialogue is just so BORING. I don't think there was a single joke or witty line in the entire movie aside from a few sight gags. In addition, the movie's voice acting is...not great. The voices of the humans are all terrible, and the voice of Pup (the main character) gets pretty grating after a while...he just sounds really whiny the whole time. I also don't think this is a very good movie for children; this is partially because the movie is extremely boring and won't retain their interest for very long, but also because a lot of it is just...not really appropriate to be showing to young kids. Mind you, I don't like it when parents go over the top with sheltering their children, but this movie is a bit more...extreme than most other children's animated movies I've seen. There's blood, animal carcasses, a physically and verbally abusive family, and at one point one of the characters says "hell". I wouldn't call my parents overprotective, but I doubt even they wouldn't have let me watch this movie. All of those problems aside, the movie does have some good parts. I liked how the water and land animals kind of came together at the end, that was a neat idea. Making the main character a mudskipper (a fish that can breathe and walk above water) was also a cool concept, and it becomes very important later on in the movie. The other characters weren't much to write home about, though, aside from the chickens. The chickens were a lot of fun. Aside from them, the rest of the ensemble cast is pretty lame, and there's a "villain" (the eel) that literally does nothing in the entire movie. You could take him out of the movie completely and nothing would change. Also, like I said before, the action sequences were entertaining. Overall, while Sea Level is WAAAY better than I expected, it is not a good movie. Watch Finding Nemo or even Shark Tale instead of this.

Julius and Pup are playing on the sea floor when two young human divers grab the shark eggs. Pup tries and fails to stop them. He becomes depressed over his failure. Julius tries to catch chicken on the beach and is almost stranded. Later, he's caught by fishermen looking for shark fins and barely escapes. Pup tries to recruit turtle Murtle and octopus Octo on a mission to rescue the shark eggs. This Malaysian animated film tries to jump up to the major leagues. The difference between this and a movie like Finding Nemo is more than the technical animation. The animation is slightly inferior but one can live with that. It's the muddled story that is the most problematic. Hollywood has a near century of experience telling stories on the big screen in less than two hours. That's what is missing in this movie. If Pup's journey is the key, then the other characters should serve him in the story. The story becomes muddled and it loses the rooting interesting of the audience. As a technical exercise, this holds a little bit of promise if the aim is a lot lower. It does need a good story teller to clean this up.

This was, by far, one of the most atrociously boring movies I have ever had the displeasure of seeing. The only two redeemable qualities about it are the surprisingly competent visuals and the environmental issues it raises.

This film is a bizarre experience before it's even begun - it doesn't even know what it's own title is!! It's 'Seafood' on the box, 'Seefood' on the disk, a combination of both during the title sequence and the picture on this page has it as 'Sea Level'!!! It's so shoddy and unprofessional it's almost laughable. I do really like the environmental theme in some scenes - it is pertinent to teach young generations about not eating shark fins and not polluting the water, however the scenes relating to these themes in the film didn't explain themselves very well and children definitely need extra clarification from adults in order to make sense of that message. It's not consistent either as there are some very confusing and possibly disturbing scenes relating to the characters eating other characters - while this is natural and children should be aware of it, it needs to be presented in a way they can make sense of and this film just doesn't do it. The children in the film are also physically hit by the adult at one point, and it was presented as a normal thing. The film had promise on some levels but the general overall experience is very poor. It really feels like it's been botched together without enough thought. On the plus side my daughter loves it, but she loves anything to do with sea creatures and she doesn't know any better. She can't make sense of it but likes it simply because it's got sharks and fish in it. In my view the dialogue was the worst part - the characters don't act or speak in a way that makes sense or feel natural. The events in the film need more explanation for children so a lot more dialogue should be included to do this. I appreciate that it isn't Disney or Pixar but it is not in any way on a comparative level as an alternative. Very poor effort. I do feel supportive of the environmental messages but wish it had been done much better.