Dreamworks' newest faux-Disney offering is a drably animated parable about the perils of watching too much Cribs. Will Smith provides the voice of a lowly fish who seems to have been christened Oscar solely so that a school of youngsters might taunt, "You so broke, your bologna has no first name." The lowly whale-wash employee can only fantasize about appearing on a billboard in the ocean equivalent of midtown Manhattan. But then a freak accident kills a shark who'd been pursuing Oscar, and the boy from the reef's South Side seizes the opportunity to reinvent himself as a shark-slaying celebrity. Clearly, the ruse can't be sustained for long.

Shark Tale has all the hallmarks of a computer-animated compromise meant to please multiple generations at once--plentiful puns that reference pop culture (news anchor Katie Current obsesses about the results of the latest Scallop Poll), extended allusions to equally popular but slightly aged culture (The Godfather is paid a lengthy tribute), and of course, fart jokes. There's also a cute girl next door and a menacing femme fatale.

And then there's the son of the God-father. Lenny (voiced by Jack Black) is a shark, but he's also "vegetarian," and the quotation marks do apply. Lenny doesn't just spew his food like a borderline bulimic; he also enjoys dressing up like a dolphin, and the way he swishes around the reef--you'd think the boy had cartilage hips. Shark Tale preaches that proletarians like Oscar should embrace the incremental rewards of capitalism, but behind this primary moral is the suggestion that kids like Lenny just need to be left alone. Who cares if your son doesn't like to munch on fish? This movie looks like the Republican convention--socially moderate, free-market evangelism with a marked disinterest in aesthetics.