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Description
!!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!!

"Help! I'm A Fish" is a Danish-German-Irish animated film first released in Denmark in the year 2000. The movie was a collaborative effort with animation being split between three different animation companies in three different countries: A. Film A/S from Denmark, Munich Animation from Germany, and Terraglyph Interactive Studios in Ireland. With the tagline "A potion put them in the ocean", the concept for this movie is almost like "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids" meets "Back To The Future" and "The Little Mermaid".

I had the good fortune to "bump into" this movie online several years back. It seems pretty obscure...of course that could just be my American perspective since this is a foreign film. Perhaps in Europe its existence is more well-known, but here I didn't find out about until nearly 6 years after its theatrical release. As seemingly underrated as it is, this movie has some of the most beautiful animation I've seen in a long time. I wouldn't see a modern 2D-animated film with artwork this splendorous again until "The Secret of Kells". It's aesthetic actually harkens back to the glory days of the 90's when making finely-crafted 2D-animated films was a grand artform. What notoriety this movie does have is owed to the pop music of the early 2000's. The Danish Teen-Pop girl group, Little Trees, preformed the title song, "Help! I'm A Fish (Little Yellow Fish)", but once again I think we here in the States got little exposure to what hype that song had since we Americans tend to be pretty stuck in our own little worlds. The movie is also sometimes called "A Fish Tale"...but I frankly prefer "Help! I'm A Fish" just because "Fish Tale" sounds a bit too generic. The title "Help! I'm A Fish" also gives you more insight into the movie's plot. "A Fish Tale" could literally be anything involving fish, but "Help! I'm A Fish" makes you raise an eyebrow and ask, "What? You weren't always a fish?"

So right off the bat, we're introduced to your standard family film cliche kid heroes. You have Fly, the cool skateboarding wiseguy troublemaker, his little sister, Stella, the adorably cute rugrat, and his cousin, Chuck, a fat socially-inept nerd. These three munchkins are left under the care of their obnoxious Aunt Anna (Chuck's mother), but they inevitably get into trouble after she falls asleep, and Fly drags the other two kids along so he can go fishing. The trio soon find themselves trapped by the tide and must escape through a strange tunnel after which they stumble upon the home of an eccentric marine biologist named Professor MacKrill.

Now Mackrill is definitely Doc Brown levels of crazy mad scientist, but like Doc Brown he's the good kind of mad scientist. In fact, his motivation in this movie is to help mankind survive the future fallout of the melting polar ice caps by...turning everybody into fish. I'll be honest , even though they play this guy up as being a scientist, his methods and mannerisms seem more akin to a wizard; especially when you hear what ingredients he uses to make his "fish potion" (also the mere fact that he calls it a potion instead of a formula). Of course in typical fantasy film fashion, everything goes awry after Stella drinks the fish potion which somehow results in her being turned into a starfish. Before anybody realizes what's happened she is mistakenly thrown into the ocean, and soon after Fly and Chuck are forced to follow her into the sea turning themselves into fish as well.

Well, actually Fly is technically the only one who really gets turned into a fish. He becomes a California Flyfish while Chuck is transformed into a jellyfish...I suppose that is a symbolic joke on how he's character is basically spineless up until the film's climax. This also further proves my point about MacKrill being more of a wizard than a scientist, because there's nothing at all scientific about his formula or its effects on human beings. It just spontaneously turns people into random marine animals without any logical basis or reasoning. His potion's effects certainly appear to be more a thing of magic, because they sure as hell don't adhere to any science book I've ever read, and to only further nail the point home one need only look at the effect his antidote has on ordinary marine life.

The film's primary antagonists are born after a Great White Shark and a Pilot Fish inhale some of the antidote leaking from the bottom of the ocean. The antidote makes them anthropomorphic; granting them the ability to speak and making them both sentient. Of course even in this case, the effects are random and inexplicable, because for some reason the Pilot Fish (who soon starts calling himself "Joe") becomes highly intelligent, manipulative, and devious while his shark counterpart is only turned into a slow-witted idiot. However I suppose the argument could be made that due to the vast difference in size, the Pilot Fish inhaled more of the formula to fill his tiny lungs while the shark only got a small whiff. Of course its hard to say for sure, since after this Joe hordes the formula only giving the other sea creatures a minimal amount so as to make them only smart enough to follow him, but not smart enough to question his assumed authority...apparently the formula also turned him into a bureaucrat.

Now I'm not going to lie, I like Fly. He's a cool guy. He's like if Dennis the Menace and Bugs Bunny had a kid. He's sly and always ready with a trick; which of course allows him to get the best of Joe and his bumbling henchmen in the end. While true that his reckless nature is what gets the kids in trouble in the first place, its his spry spirited character that ultimately pulls them through it. He's quite the contrast from his nerdy cousin, Chuck who despite seemingly being the voice of reason has honestly no backbone or confidence. He lacks drive and tenacity. The major contrast between them leads the two to bicker and squabble a lot for most of the film. Now don't get me wrong! Chuck usually turns out to be right, but he's a also wimpy worrywart who despite being vocal is not as quick to act. You could say that while Fly leaps before he looks, Chuck looks but never leaps. However this does change by the film's climax. After Fly gets the spit knocked out of him by the "King Crab" he looses his nerve forcing Chuck to step up and take the reins in order to save them all. In the end, it could be said the two boys finally settle their differences by learning from one another.

I'll say this for Joe. That potion must have granted him some extreme micromanagement skills because he became sentient and then built an entire civilized fish infrastructure all in the same day. Talk about kicking evolution up a notch! SHEESH! That sucker works fast, and even though he dies in the end the society he built still goes on in his absence; meaning that there's an interesting epilogue this movie doesn't address wherein the fish population steadily grows increasingly smarter as the years go on. MacKrill and the kids might have unwittingly sowed the seeds for an impending fish apocalypse. I also gotta say too that the manner and look of Joe vaguely reminds me of another villain from another underrated foreign film. For those of you who have seen and remember the movie, "Rock 'n' Rule", Joe somewhat reminds me a little bit of Mok both in appearance and demeanor. It helps a lot too that he happens to be voiced by Severus Snape...I mean Alan Rickman. Of course the irony to Joe's character is that as smart as he becomes he quickly falls prey to the same trap that many "intelligent minds" fall victim to...he gets too smart for his own good! In the end, it's what causes his death, but even before that his "sophisticated mentality" led him to make some pretty stupid choices. One lesson he should have learned fast was not to burn your bridges...especially when one of those bridges is a short-tempered Great White Shark.

Again, I don't know. Over in Europe this movie might be a household name, but it wasn't even released here in America, so most of us have never even heard of it, but regardless of its notoriety or lack thereof, this is a charming family film that I was very pleased to have stumbled upon. After seeing it for the first time, it instantly became a new personal favorite. In some mild ways the tone and style remind me fondly of many a Don Bluth films; which is always a plus in my book. "Help! I'm A Fish" (or "A Fish Tale"), another delightful treat from the early 2000's before the animation mainstream became flooded with garbage and mediocrity.

Description
!!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!!

"Help! I'm A Fish" is a Danish-German-Irish animated film first released in Denmark in the year 2000. The movie was a collaborative effort with animation being split between three different animation companies in three different countries: A. Film A/S from Denmark, Munich Animation from Germany, and Terraglyph Interactive Studios in Ireland. With the tagline "A potion put them in the ocean", the concept for this movie is almost like "Honey, I Shrunk The Kids" meets "Back To The Future" and "The Little Mermaid".

I had the good fortune to "bump into" this movie online several years back. It seems pretty obscure...of course that could just be my American perspective since this is a foreign film. Perhaps in Europe its existence is more well-known, but here I didn't find out about until nearly 6 years after its theatrical release. As seemingly underrated as it is, this movie has some of the most beautiful animation I've seen in a long time. I wouldn't see a modern 2D-animated film with artwork this splendorous again until "The Secret of Kells". It's aesthetic actually harkens back to the glory days of the 90's when making finely-crafted 2D-animated films was a grand artform. What notoriety this movie does have is owed to the pop music of the early 2000's. The Danish Teen-Pop girl group, Little Trees, preformed the title song, "Help! I'm A Fish (Little Yellow Fish)", but once again I think we here in the States got little exposure to what hype that song had since we Americans tend to be pretty stuck in our own little worlds. The movie is also sometimes called "A Fish Tale"...but I frankly prefer "Help! I'm A Fish" just because "Fish Tale" sounds a bit too generic. The title "Help! I'm A Fish" also gives you more insight into the movie's plot. "A Fish Tale" could literally be anything involving fish, but "Help! I'm A Fish" makes you raise an eyebrow and ask, "What? You weren't always a fish?"

So right off the bat, we're introduced to your standard family film cliche kid heroes. You have Fly, the cool skateboarding wiseguy troublemaker, his little sister, Stella, the adorably cute rugrat, and his cousin, Chuck, a fat socially-inept nerd. These three munchkins are left under the care of their obnoxious Aunt Anna (Chuck's mother), but they inevitably get into trouble after she falls asleep, and Fly drags the other two kids along so he can go fishing. The trio soon find themselves trapped by the tide and must escape through a strange tunnel after which they stumble upon the home of an eccentric marine biologist named Professor MacKrill.

Now Mackrill is definitely Doc Brown levels of crazy mad scientist, but like Doc Brown he's the good kind of mad scientist. In fact, his motivation in this movie is to help mankind survive the future fallout of the melting polar ice caps by...turning everybody into fish. I'll be honest , even though they play this guy up as being a scientist, his methods and mannerisms seem more akin to a wizard; especially when you hear what ingredients he uses to make his "fish potion" (also the mere fact that he calls it a potion instead of a formula). Of course in typical fantasy film fashion, everything goes awry after Stella drinks the fish potion which somehow results in her being turned into a starfish. Before anybody realizes what's happened she is mistakenly thrown into the ocean, and soon after Fly and Chuck are forced to follow her into the sea turning themselves into fish as well.

Well, actually Fly is technically the only one who really gets turned into a fish. He becomes a California Flyfish while Chuck is transformed into a jellyfish...I suppose that is a symbolic joke on how he's character is basically spineless up until the film's climax. This also further proves my point about MacKrill being more of a wizard than a scientist, because there's nothing at all scientific about his formula or its effects on human beings. It just spontaneously turns people into random marine animals without any logical basis or reasoning. His potion's effects certainly appear to be more a thing of magic, because they sure as hell don't adhere to any science book I've ever read, and to only further nail the point home one need only look at the effect his antidote has on ordinary marine life.

The film's primary antagonists are born after a Great White Shark and a Pilot Fish inhale some of the antidote leaking from the bottom of the ocean. The antidote makes them anthropomorphic; granting them the ability to speak and making them both sentient. Of course even in this case, the effects are random and inexplicable, because for some reason the Pilot Fish (who soon starts calling himself "Joe") becomes highly intelligent, manipulative, and devious while his shark counterpart is only turned into a slow-witted idiot. However I suppose the argument could be made that due to the vast difference in size, the Pilot Fish inhaled more of the formula to fill his tiny lungs while the shark only got a small whiff. Of course its hard to say for sure, since after this Joe hordes the formula only giving the other sea creatures a minimal amount so as to make them only smart enough to follow him, but not smart enough to question his assumed authority...apparently the formula also turned him into a bureaucrat.

Now I'm not going to lie, I like Fly. He's a cool guy. He's like if Dennis the Menace and Bugs Bunny had a kid. He's sly and always ready with a trick; which of course allows him to get the best of Joe and his bumbling henchmen in the end. While true that his reckless nature is what gets the kids in trouble in the first place, its his spry spirited character that ultimately pulls them through it. He's quite the contrast from his nerdy cousin, Chuck who despite seemingly being the voice of reason has honestly no backbone or confidence. He lacks drive and tenacity. The major contrast between them leads the two to bicker and squabble a lot for most of the film. Now don't get me wrong! Chuck usually turns out to be right, but he's a also wimpy worrywart who despite being vocal is not as quick to act. You could say that while Fly leaps before he looks, Chuck looks but never leaps. However this does change by the film's climax. After Fly gets the spit knocked out of him by the "King Crab" he looses his nerve forcing Chuck to step up and take the reins in order to save them all. In the end, it could be said the two boys finally settle their differences by learning from one another.

I'll say this for Joe. That potion must have granted him some extreme micromanagement skills because he became sentient and then built an entire civilized fish infrastructure all in the same day. Talk about kicking evolution up a notch! SHEESH! That sucker works fast, and even though he dies in the end the society he built still goes on in his absence; meaning that there's an interesting epilogue this movie doesn't address wherein the fish population steadily grows increasingly smarter as the years go on. MacKrill and the kids might have unwittingly sowed the seeds for an impending fish apocalypse. I also gotta say too that the manner and look of Joe vaguely reminds me of another villain from another underrated foreign film. For those of you who have seen and remember the movie, "Rock 'n' Rule", Joe somewhat reminds me a little bit of Mok both in appearance and demeanor. It helps a lot too that he happens to be voiced by Severus Snape...I mean Alan Rickman. Of course the irony to Joe's character is that as smart as he becomes he quickly falls prey to the same trap that many "intelligent minds" fall victim to...he gets too smart for his own good! In the end, it's what causes his death, but even before that his "sophisticated mentality" led him to make some pretty stupid choices. One lesson he should have learned fast was not to burn your bridges...especially when one of those bridges is a short-tempered Great White Shark.

Again, I don't know. Over in Europe this movie might be a household name, but it wasn't even released here in America, so most of us have never even heard of it, but regardless of its notoriety or lack thereof, this is a charming family film that I was very pleased to have stumbled upon. After seeing it for the first time, it instantly became a new personal favorite. In some mild ways the tone and style remind me fondly of many a Don Bluth films; which is always a plus in my book. "Help! I'm A Fish" (or "A Fish Tale"), another delightful treat from the early 2000's before the animation mainstream became flooded with garbage and mediocrity.