My daughter has correctly identified Moana as possibly Disney’s greatest film. (Possibly anyone’s greatest film, in fact. Come on, fight me.) So we were looking forward to seeing The Sea Beast, Chris William’s new Netflix backed animated picture. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be in the same territory.
Well, it’s in exactly the same territory, of course – the water. If you don’t watch the whole movie, everyone should at least see the first fifteen minutes, which features maybe the greatest sea battle ever filmed, full of wonderfully detailed and nuanced animation and clear, spectacular action.
The script, on the other hand, is where nuance went to die. Here is a film that demonstrates that writing children is hard. Orphan stowaway Maisie Brumble is sweet, but she has a lot of terribly on the nose dialogue.
In her scene with her protector Jacob, she tells him, ‘All you have is me and all I have is you. And that don’t sound so bad. What do you say? Shall we give it a go?’ ‘You mean like a family?’ he asks. ‘Sure,’ she tells him.
It’s a nice sentiment… but if you’ve watched the film you’ll know that this emotional landscape has just been far better expressed and explored using the body language of the two characters in the previous fifteen seconds. We can read everything we need to know about the feelings of the people in this scene from the way they hold their shoulders and move their eyes.
Adding all this talky-talky-talking simply diffuses the power of the moment. This film is full of wonderful character animation, facilitated by software that allows incredible, painstaking detail. Early in the movie the way that Captain Crow carefully turns his shot glass on his tabletop tells us more about him than two pages of dialogue. So could we please retain the confidence to tell more of the story that way?