The Reef Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.0

The Reef Blu-ray Movie Review

Insert your own anagram here.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 22, 2011

I love anagrams. Rearranging the letters of phrases to come up with sometimes amazingly meaningful commentaries on the original source material is fun and often challening. (There was a hilariously great Simpsons episode about this very thing, when Lisa was uncharacteristically not fast enough to come up with a fitting anagram at a genius friend's house). I kept wondering if I could find suitably acerbic anagrams for Finding Nemo as I watched The Reef, a little animated feature that never received a real theatrical release stateside, and has instead been consigned to the straight to video market. Coming up with an anagram for Finding Nemo seemed particularly appropriate as a way to describe The Reef, for it simply takes elements from that great Disney-Pixar enterprise and rearranges them willy-nilly as it sees fit. But Ding-fin omen?? Well, you try rearranging the letters of Finding Nemo to come up with a clever and meaningful anagram. Some other choices might have included Demon Fig Inn, No Def Mining or Men Nod If Gin. One way or the other, any of those selections make about as much sense as this film (namely, not much), while using the elements of Finding Nemo in slightly rearranged form. Of course, this film was originally released as Shark Bait, so we could also go with A Brisk Hat or Hi, Rat Bask. But wait! The Reef also works in all sorts of elements from The Little Mermaid (Herm Titillated Me), The Karate Kid (Treated Khaki) and others, so go crazy creating your own anagrams. It's probably a better use of time than watching this warmed over rehash of an underwater saga featuring a plucky fish who must set out on a quest to, well, find himself and his true calling after his parents are unceremoniously swept up in a fishnet, never to be seen again.

After getting separated from his hapless parents, little Pi (voiced by Freddie Prinze, Jr.) sets off with some nurturing porpoises to find his Aunt Pearl (Fran Drescher) at an underwater paradise known as The Reef. Pi was born into the fetid waters outside of Boston harbor, and he's used to a life filled with industrial sludge, medical waste and the occasional passing three eyed fish. In a montage straight out of a mid-1940's Warner Brothers melodrama, we get to see Pi grow up as he learns to vault above the water, porpoise style, and then he's shuttled on his way to The Reef, where he quickly comes in contact with his cousin Dylan (Andy Dick), Pearl's son. Dylan is seen gazing at the local Reef celebrity, Cordelia (Evan Rachel Wood), a superstar who has twice graced the cover of National Geographic. Of course Pi quickly develops a romantic interest in Cordelia, but Cordelia is being stalked by a bully shark named Troy (Donal Logue), who isn't exactly moving aside to let Pi in. Against this halting romantic triangle we get a subplot featuring a mystical turtle named Nerissa (Rob Schneider), an aging shelled beast who happens to have amazing martial arts skills. Nerissa also guards a gargantuan pearl. In this culture, males proclaim their love for a female by presenting them with pearls. Do you have enough pieces now to completely assemble this filmic puzzle? I thought so.

While there’s nothing horribly wrong with The Reef, the entire enterprise simply seems stale and repetitive when compared to any number of better animated films. What really hobbles this outing is the completely haphazard way the screenplay lurches from plot point to plot point, often with absolutely no segues or linking strategies. Dylan and Pi get scared out of their wits in their first attempt to sneak up on Nerissa. And yet that sequence just flat out ends with no real conclusion. Cordelia mistakes a lure for a fish in distress and is briefly hooked, whereupon Pi comes to her rescue. But what seems to be leading up to a big punchline again just kind of sits there without going anywhere, and soon we’re off on a new tangent.

A lot of the voice work here is appealing. Drescher and Dick are less over the top than usual, and Prinze and Wood make for a likable romantic duo. The main vocal honors here undoubtedly go to the inimitable John Rhys-Davies as a sort of mutant yellow walrus who recites poetry, I guess a la Lewis Carroll’s character in Alice in Wonderland. Rhys-Davies’ voice is perfectly imposing and gives the film a nice bit of sonic propulsion when he either narrates or is on screen.

The biggest problem with The Reef is that it simply can’t escape the rather formidable shadow of Finding Nemo. The Reef simply treads too much of the same water to ever make its own impact felt, and even the often bare bones animation seems culled directly from either Nemo, or in the case of some of the supporting undersea characters, The Little Mermaid. When you have a crab spouting Jamaican patois, what else are you supposed to think than that you’ve wandered into a little known sequel to a more famous film?

There are moments of nicely detailed imagery throughout The Reef which may save it from being consigned to the scrap heap of straight to video titles, at least for younger tots. The Reef itself is amazingly bright and colorful and many of the supporting characters are fun, if not especially innovative or very memorable. As I've mentioned repeatedly in other reviews of less than stellar animated product, Disney-Pixar especially has raised the bar so improbably high over the past several years that second (or frankly third) string efforts like The Reef don't stand much of a chance, especially when compared to their better developed kin. I'll cloak my summation of The Reef in a little anagram for you: Fly, Mealier Llama.

The Reef Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Reef swims onto Blu-ray with an appealing looking AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1 (the accompanying SD-DVD is in 1.33:1). This is a pretty decent looking CGI animated film for something which was done on a relatively miniscule budget. While backgrounds are sometimes fairly nondescript, the character animation is good to excellent, and colors are often incredibly robust and beautifully saturated. Close-ups of various characters like Drescher's bright purple Pearl or Rhys-Davies' glistening golden Thorton offer at least a semblance of texture and fine detail. Most of the fish are smooth and textureless, but they offer sometimes brilliant color that looks very good. Line detail is good and of course with a purely digital source there is no artifacting of any kind. This is certainly heads and shoulders above other recent low-budget Blu-ray animated features like Hoodwinked (from a purely visual standpoint, anyway).

The Reef Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Reef doesn't have the magic of a Menken or Newman score to elevate its sound design, but the film's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is nicely immersive, with the expected bevy of gurgling water noises penetrating all of the surrounds with a fair degree of regularity. Voicework isn't overly directional here, and is anchored pretty thoroughly in the front channels. Sound effects are the best thing about this sound mix, and there are some very fun effects which spiral out through the surrounds, especially when Pi is learning some martial arts tricks. Christopher Lennerts' underscore is very good in its own limited way, and the balance between dialogue, effects and music is artfully handled. Fidelity is very good throughout this offering, though the sound design itself doesn't really offer a wealth of bombastic LFE or other overtly showy details.

The Reef Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The Reef is yet another film which is following the odd trend of providing exclusive bonus content only on the accompanying standard-def DVD copy which is enclosed in the two-pak. So, while the Blu-ray boasts no supplemental content, the DVD contains:

• Feature Commentary is really quite good, and offers a lot of detail from director Howard Baker and producer Mark Dippé. The two talk about co-producing with South Korean counterparts, and Baker talks about his history with such series as Ren and Stimpy, Aeon Flux and Rugrats. Perhaps most surprisingly, the two don't studiously avoid mentioning Disney, though Dippé's assertion that the Miyazaki films don't really work for stateside audiences might be left open for debate.
• Storyboard Gallery shows some fairly basic drawings of sequences like Pi's parents being hoisted into the nefarious net.
• Trailer

The Reef Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Reef has some nice elements to recommend it, but overall it simply can't escape the inevitable comparison with Finding Nemo. This American and South Korean co-production has some very nice, colorful animation to support its wafer thin story, but even bright colors can't ultimately distract from a screenplay that just sort of lurches from plot point to plot point without any real drama or character development. All of this said, younger kids will probably get enough of a kick out of this feature that parents may want to rent it for an evening's entertainment. Grown ups will probably find themselves in the same boat (so to speak) as Dory, the Ellen DeGeneres character from Finding Nemo, not remembering this film the moment after they've seen it.