The Shark Film Office

[For the month of September 2016, I am writing a series of shared posts in conjunction with another of my websites,  Cinema 4: Cel Bloc , about cartoons that feature sharks in them. You can read the reviews on either site, but please do visit the other one if you like the content I have to offer.] Codfish Balls  (1930) Dir.: Frank Moser TC4P Rating: 5/9 Species: cartoon sharks, a gang of them with stunted bodies and sawblade-like dorsal fins. Sharks in the early days of animation came in a wide variety of styles. I suppose that if one were to use the argument that if there are over 500 identified species of sharks in the world, why shouldn't there be that many species too in the animated shark world, only in a more fanciful sense. I guess that I would have to somewhat agree with such a musing. Why not indeed? In cartoons, mice, ducks, and cats and all other manner of animals speak like us, drive cars, fly planes, have dogs for pets, captain boats, wear clothe...

[For the month of September 2016, I am writing a series of shared posts in conjunction with another of my websites, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc , about cartoons that feature sharks in them. You can read the reviews on either site, but please do visit the other one if you like the content I have to offer.] Salt Water Taffy  (1930) Dir.: Frank Moser and Paul Terry TC4P Rating: 5/9 Species: cartoon shark, this time with snubbed dorsal fin; appears to be the pet of an octopus and is on a rather undefined form of leash. Probably a dogfish. Just as with live-action narrative films, there are far more animated films out there with sharks in them than you might think. The reasons one does not often think of such things, outside of a commonly held public disinterest in the animated state of sharks, are probably many, but there are probably a couple of main reason that really sum up why sharks are really second – and even possibly steerage – class citizens in the cartoon world. The first i...

I am unsure if this poster is for the same movie or an earlier conception of it, since the shark in this film does not have anything strapped to its back. Atomic Shark (2016) Dir.: A.B. Stone TC4P Rating: 4/9 Species: great white shark mutated by atomic radiation; has red hot, glowing dorsal fin that can slice through people and objects (or so it seems); scores of other sharks, seemingly all great whites, appear late in film. A couple of weeks ago, I was in awe of a Philippe Cousteau documentary – Nuclear Sharks – where Cousteau and his crew, including his wife, Ashlan Gorse, visited Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, an area where the United States performed a series of atom bomb tests over a period of a dozen years from 1946 to 1958. Our country, in seeking to further study atomic power, decimated the area, and even distant populations thought to be out of the direct path of the explosions experienced medical difficulties (up to and including death) from the radioactive fa...