Giant creatures terrorize the seas, or so we think, in “The Sea Beast,” the new animated feature from Oscar-winning director Chris Williams (“Big Hero 6,” “Moana”) in his first collaboration with the now–financially embattled streaming pioneer, Netflix.
A young orphan, Maisie Brumble (voiced by Zaris-Angel Hator) has read all about the hunters in storybooks, men and women who sail the waters searching for monsters to kill and preventing them from reaching the populated shores. According to the crown-sanctioned history of this kingdom, the war between mankind and the massive inhabitants of the sea is a longstanding conflict where blameless humans act only to defend themselves.
Prominent among those heroic seamen Maisie admires are Captain Crow (Jared Harris) and his protégé Jacob Holland (Karl Urban). Bent on killing the Red Bluster, a kaiju-like nemesis that took his eye in battle, Crow commands his vessel, the Inevitable, with that mission as his sole purpose. Meanwhile Jacob, an avid lance-thrower who lost his family in a shipwreck as a child, follows Crow’s orders like a son listening to his father.
As the royals threaten to discontinue their alliance with rogue hunters for their own advanced fleet, Crow vows to capture the Bluster once and for all. But when Maisie stows away and goes against the captain’s wish for retribution, she and Jacob embark on an odyssey of their own to learn that the critters they fear are just as afraid of them.
With a welcomed anti-colonialist stance that believes people can, and should, change their perspective even if their worldview seems immovable, the screenplay by Williams and co-writer Nell Benjamin (his first credit in an animation project) touches on themes pertinent to our modern age, even if there are holes caused by oversimplification in its argument.
What’s truly exhilarating about the “The Sea Beast” are its action sequences, specifically the high-octane cinematography and editing that give a striking fluidity to the fights. For example, the first confrontation between the Inevitable crew and a tentacled monster boasts some of the most compelling camera movements and seamless execution seen in any animated project in recent years. The segment introduces Jacob’s valiant and resourceful abilities, setting the tone for the sense of adventure that prevails throughout.
The same can’t be said about the character design and the character animation in certain sequences. Close-up shots of Captain Crow and some of the other supporting characters aboard the Inevitable exhibit poorly rendered figures; their facial details and stilted movement feel akin to that of 3D CG features and video games from decades past.
The monsters themselves, including the Red Bluster and Maisie’s brightly-colored pet Blue, come off as generic in their conception, with bodies that showcase simplistically smooth textures and basic shapes. It’s as if the budget was allocated for the production design — the ships, the seaside town, and the water look top-notch in detail and photorealism — but then proved insufficient for other elements.
Ultimately, the film exudes a visual unevenness throughout that aesthetically places it somewhere between those direct-to-video, low-quality CG animated releases randomly found on Redbox and a major production with some imposing cinematic components.
“The Sea Beast” displays Williams’ artistic limitations without the infrastructure of Walt Disney Animation, but for a director creatively bred in that system to embark upon a voyage lacking the familiar safety net, resources, and marketing prowess of the House of Mouse speaks of a brave search for narrative freedom, even as he assumes major risks. The choice is reminiscent of Don Bluth’s decision to leave Disney in the 1970s to start his own company, where he could tell the stories he wanted to tell how he wanted to tell them.
The results of the departure are less impressive in Williams’’ case, but there’s still a notable maturity to “The Sea Beast” that could have clashed with the mostly sanitized storytelling that currently dominates Disney. Sailors drink their pints and bleed when injured.
But though one can appreciate Williams’ and Benjamin’s interest in crafting a philosophically layered fable, there’s a righteousness to the message of “You must change!” that blindsides the adult characters. In the expansive duration of “The Sea Beast,” the creators didn’t find time to examine why Captain Crow and Jacob behave the way they do, instead demanding they abandon their ways without much compassion for their respective trauma and loss that prompted them to hold those beliefs in the first place.
In its final act, the story is so quickly and seemingly neatly wrapped that we don’t even get a resolution on Captain Crow’s destiny once he realizes that killing the large creatures is wrong. “The Sea Beast” also presents a character like Sarah Sharpe (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a Black woman officer, with little depth of character beyond her loyalty.
For all their efforts to show us that non-human entities are individuals that experience physical and psychological pain, and in turn using that as a metaphor for our biases towards those we don’t know, the filmmakers emotionally shortchange most of their human protagonists. The touching exception being Maisie, whose defined arc as someone willing to question what she thought to be true, even though her parents presumably died as heroes, exemplifies the ideal mindset.
As bumpy as many of its components appear, one notion “The Sea Beast” unequivocally notes is how effortlessly inclusive fantasy stories can be when creators and studios prioritize that inclusion in an organic manner. And while there are limitations to the film’s discussion of unchallenged heroism and the way that victors write history to their advantage, the fact that these exist in a family-friendly release at least make it more ideologically sophisticated than most.
“The Sea Beast” premieres globally on Netflix July 8.