I should have known better. With a title like The Pout-Pout Fish, I should have known this movie was the opposite of Legos. All Lego boxes have warnings like “ages 5 and up” on them. The Pout-Pout Fish should have a warning for adults “ages 5 and down. Signs include boredom, drifting off to sleep, and being awoken your delirious kid on a candy high in the theater.” Oh and “fart noises, early and often.”
At least the sad looking Mr. Fish is voiced fatefully by Nick Offerman. The ocean pout goes about his day as you’d expect on the reef, bringing everyone’s mood down with his surly demeanor. Every fish, except leafy seadragon Pip (Nina Oyama), oldest child of her parents with 300 ish younger siblings on the way. After Pip mistakes Mr. Fish’s abandoned ship for a junkyard and wrecks it, the pair seek out the mysterious Shimmer (Jordin Sparks), a fish who has the ability to grant wishes. But they have to beat Benji (Remy Hii), a cuttlefish who’s home is about to lose its sunlight to a kelp forest, and his mom Marin (Miranda Otto) will have no choice but to take over the reef by force.
The Pout-Pout Fish comes from a children’s book, so expect that level of storytelling. Each new page is basically a new biome, as Mr. Fish (they couldn’t call him Glarry or Glower?, I’m not even trying at that took me 5 seconds) and Pip travel the ocean in search of Shimmer. By age 8 you will guess what the “plot twists” are going to be, and how the kelp problem will be solved with straightforward dialogue like “I LOVE KELP! I could eat it all day!” Kids will love Pip’s cuteness; adults will find him that annoying type of kids character who always screws up so the plot can keep going. There’s something in there about learning to open yourself up to others and childhood trauma, but all that is hammered home so often that it lessens the impact of the message to anyone not in kindergarten. There are exactly 2 interesting parts of The Pout-Pout Fish, one good one bad. The good one is what Amy Sedaris does with the dolphin characters, silly but with some bite. The bad one is inexplicably in the third act the directors stage the cuttlefish invasion like it’s Aleppo Syria for about a minute. I nearly gasped at this level of boldness in a movie without any.
So, The Pout-Pout Fish is a bridge to Finding Nemo parents. Keep that in mind, and get a little bigger sized coke to put more caffeine in you before you fall asleep. Plus, if you want some fun use of leafy seadragons, when your kids go to bed, start playing Dave the Diver, where you can race with them and make some sweet coin!