100 Movie Project - The Sea Beast

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The following post contains spoilers for The Sea Beast.

I remember seeing this pop up on Netflix when it first came out. A lot of the new stuff that Netflix recommends I don’t have much interest in. I’m pretty sure most of what they recommend (maybe not in the recommended list but at the top of the main page) is there because it’s new and/or made by Netflix, not because they actually think you’ll like it. But The Sea Beast is different. It was definitely something I was interested in. An animated film with sea monsters and people on boats fighting them. Sign me up.

The animation and design were great. It didn’t do anything different or out of the ordinary like Klaus but still looked good. The characters were interesting and varied, the boats and the ocean looked good, and the monsters were menacing. I also quite liked the kingdom were everyone came from. It had a cool design, with the castle facing a sort of lagoon that was separated from the ocean by a big gate. And the monsters. Thinking back I think there might have only been a couple but they were all all good: a giant crab, a sort of huge squid like you might see in old sea monster stuff, and the Red Bluster that they’re hunting, which sort of looked like a prehistoric sea creature. And there were a couple of spectacular scenes as well, led by an underwater scene where main characters Jacob and Masie see the Red Bluster.

I thought the acting was good as well. Jared Harris as Captain Crow was great with a bit of range throughout the film. His regular sort of scratchy I guess voice? That’s a bad description. But he sounded exactly like an old-time boat captain should. Plus there were scenes where he was a little more introspective and, in the second half of the film, where he was becoming increasingly unhinged and you could hear it in his voice. Zaris-Angel Hator, who voiced Masie, was also excellent, ranging from bravado after she tries to smuggle herself onto the ship, to fear when she sees what it’s like, to incredible excitement when talking about crow. I was also a fan of Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s more understated Sarah, the first mate on Crow’s ship. Jean-Baptiste gave Sarah a sort of world weary feel as the voice of reason on the ship, in contrast to Crow’s brashness.

The story was also well written. It starts as a story about humans trying to stop sea monsters from terrorizing them before moving into more WORD FOR BEING NICE territory. Some might find this a little obvious and preachy since there’s probably obvious criticism of things like whaling and the human penchant for violence against ‘the other’ in there. But I personally wasn’t bothered by it. I liked how the younger generation had to struggle against the older to show them that things weren’t always so black and white and I liked watching a lot of the other characters slowly come around. I liked how the monsters were humanized. And I loved Crow’s descent into madness, which had some likely parallels to Captain Ahab in Moby Dick.

No film is without it’s flaws though. I felt the end of the movie seemed kind of rushed. Everything was obviously leading to a showdown between Crow and the Red Bluster but it seemed to start and then end pretty quickly. The story line with Crow making a deal with Gwen also fell a little flat. It seemed to promise something bad and nothing came of it. But overall I felt these were fairly small problems considering how much I enjoyed the film overall.

The Sea Beast completely snuck up on me. I don’t remember seeing anything about it until it came out, or maybe right before. But that might be the best kind of movie. No agonizing wait, just the payoff.

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