Usually, when movies decide to take a stab at well-trod plotlines, they tend to fall flat. Incredibly flat. We’re talking, “can of sparkling water left out for an entire day” flat. And when they try to incorporate multiple troped-out plotlines? Well, then you can bet that their can’s been left out an entire month, forgotten behind a legion of similarly-discarded half-drunk sparkling water cans.
So imagine my surprise when Netflix’s The Sea Beast—a new animated movie that uses trope upon trope and keeps adding them up—worked as well as it did. Did it make me choke on my own snot in a gross display of emotion? No, not at all, it’s not that sort of movie. But the sort of movie that it’s trying to be is a movie that ends up being, quite honestly, perfect for what it is.
Jack-Of-All-Tropes (Yes, all of them. Minor Spoilers.)
I didn’t really expect much going into The Sea Beast, I was just looking for something to put on before bed. But the movie just kept surprising me with its many layers, and I still don’t know how it managed to make them all work as well as they did. Perhaps because they were all introduced with brevity, and didn’t infantilize or patronize the audience, like many animated movies do.
Initially, it seems like it’ll be a movie about an orphan girl, Maisie, who has adventures, and that’s about it. Simple enough, many a story has been built off that premise. But then, we meet Karl Urban’s Ken-Doll protagonist, Jacob, and we’re thrust into a Sinbad-esque situation where there’s a motley crew, and they’re at sea, fighting monsters … at this point, I figure, why not.
But then, the captain of the crew, Crow, has a near-death experience, and he decides to have a sobering conversation with Jacob, whom he regards as his son. It takes a very fatalistic turn, and one begins to wonder, Well, holy shit, I guess this is still a kid’s movie?
Maisie meets Jacob at a tavern, and the foundations of a found-family plot are laid. But then, Crow and Jacob visit the King and Queen, and the mood is once again sobered by Crow’s grim presence and the stakes he can’t help but raise. And also, the King and Queen are obviously evil, so now we have all sorts of angles to work with.
Wait, wait, there’s more. This is also a movie with the message, Hey, monsters are actually cool! It’s the people who suck! I had to pause for a moment and consider whether or not I was actually just watching a cooler version of How to Train Your Dragon. (What makes it cooler? Obviously the ocean shit, keep up, guys.)
Yep, the “Big Bad Monster,” a whale-like creature nicknamed Red, is actually super sweet and docile, and she saves the new family duo multiple times. In fact, they even put in a Kaiju fight between Red and a massive crab. It’s not the first such fight involving a monster, there’s quite a few, but it’s the only one between two of them, and zoo wee mama it’s disorienting to follow.
You thought I was done? Ha! You really thought! We don’t just have Kaiju, we also have teeny-tiny little monsters, and there’s an island full of them. The movie plays with both Up and Lilo and Stitch concepts in this regard, in just a few minutes before the crew takes off again, but in that time, we meet Blue, a jelly-like lil guy who becomes Maisie’s first pet. Pretty cute, and unlike some pet sidekicks, Blue actually comes in handy a few times.
Then there’s the “forbidden bargain” angle between Crow and a random scientist, the “precocious child saves the world” angle, even a government coup angle (which was actually pretty dope to see in a kid’s movie). The movie is just … all over the place. So it’s baffling to me that it works as well as it does.
My only hypothesis is that it reminds me of classic adventure novels: the sort that don’t really have a core premise, or maybe they do, but they’re ultimately only special because of all the twists and turns they incorporate. Ever since The Odyssey, these stories engross readers for what they invoke in your imagination. And The Sea Beast runs entirely on its imagination.
It takes all these old concepts and does something that wise writers do. It doesn’t try to do away with these concepts in favor of “new” material, only to end up circling back to a dogshit, unoriginal premise: it leans into what’s already worked in the past, then makes it its own. Jacob and Maisie are not original characters at all, yet they end up being a great deal deeper than you might have expected. Red is literally the Toothless of the Sea, but by the end of the movie, she’s just Red to you. Even Crow, Surly Captain #80085, has a lot going for him that separates him from other Surly Captains.
And yes, maybe all of this only worked because the movie is gorgeous to look at. It’s absolutely beautiful. Multiple times, I annoyed my dog by saying, YOOOOO, at a scene that totally floored me. But hey, that’s not a bad thing. As the technology for animating grows even better, why shouldn’t these studios rise to the occasion?
To conclude: if it wasn’t obvious by now, yeah, I think you should watch this movie. I don’t know if I’d call it a game-changer, but it’s incredibly fun, and it’s a perfect summer movie.
Unless you have thalassophobia. In which case, maybe not.
(Featured Image: Netflix)
