How Did Shark Tale Get Nominated For An Oscar?

If you are an aficionado of the Oscars, then you know the most interesting stories don’t come from just the nomination reveals alone. Most of the time, what you think will get nominated, does so. With that said, sometimes the categories will surprise you. It’s why it always comes down to the individual nominations that pop up where the stories begin to unfold: whether it was, for instance, the shock of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close getting nominated despite being critically panned and not gaining any other award traction, the many stories of the Best Actor/Actress/Best Supporting Actor/Actress stories of folks always being the bridesmaid never the bride like Deborah Kerr, or how Suicide Squad beat out Star Trek Beyond for Best Makeup. The stories become more entertaining when you look at the individual categories and find something that, on the surface, seems kind of odd, but you then dig deeper and find the layers of actions and decision-making that led to this nomination. Obviously, the main intent and goal of the Oscars is to nominate and award the best and most important films of the year. We are here to talk about the fact that in some years, a few films were nominated when they had no reason being there. One of those is the story of how on January 25th, 2005, when all the nominations were announced, in the Best Animated Feature category, Shark Tale was there. 

In a category that also had Shrek 2 from DreamWorks and Pixar/Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, Shark Tale stands out like a sore thumb. Often considered to be not only the worst animated film of 2004, but also DreamWorks’ worst film that they have ever made, Shark Tale currently sits at 35% on Rotten Tomatoes, and if you made a ranking of animated films that were nominated, it would probably sit at the very bottom. So, what happened? How did this movie get in? Was it some underhanded conspiracy by the Hollywood elite to get this Will Smith and Jack Black film an award to win? Did some movie get unjustly snubbed? Unlike something more interesting to discuss like Oscars “so white” or the complicated To Leslie fiasco, where Andrea Riseborough got a nomination for Best Actress through questionable campaigning despite the tepid to non-existence reaction to her movie, and got blamed for taking the spots from actresses like Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler, the whole situation with Shark Tale is not as interesting as you would hope it would be. By the time we finish breaking it down, hopefully you get a better understanding of how the process works in practice, rather than in theory. 

First up, let’s be real: 2004 was not a great year for the theatrical US animation scene. It had a few more standout films outside the ones that got nominated if you look outside the US scene. Even if you combine the US and overseas theatrical releases, you got a rather limited number of movies. These include Hiroyuki Imaishi’s Dead Leaves, The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (which got bumped to 2005’s Oscars), Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game, Polar Express, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Steamboy, the first Yugioh movie, Pyramid of Light, and Makoto Shinkai’s first feature film The Promise Made In Our Early Days. With that said, I wouldn’t call it a stellar year. And again, as I have mentioned before, the voters have always had a bias against foreign features, whether it’s live-action or animated. That might not be as true now with foreign features gaining more interest and awards at the Oscars than ever, but we are talking about 2004. And we’re not even just covering the films that were submitted. Overall 2004 was just “kind of whatever” so the more notable features stood out, but the Oscar voters weren’t going to vote for 90% of these movies. Even if there were better movies than Shark Tale, did you know who Makoto Shinkai, Masaaki Yuasa, or Hiroyuki Imaishi were back then? You probably didn’t. Although America was finally recognizing Hayao Miyazaki, his film got pushed to the 2005 award season. Even if The SpongeBob Movie is a beloved classic animated feature, the voters weren’t going to nominate a movie based on a TV show. You can argue that their judgment became better since Spirited Away won the very second Best Animated Feature, but as Bong Joon-ho said many times, the Oscars are very US-focused, and sadly, even with Spirited Away winning, and Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit winning the year after, they weren’t going to let another foreign feature get the Oscar again anytime soon once Pixar picked up the pace again with their films. 

While many would argue about how many times Disney and/or Pixar deserved the Best Animated Feature, The Incredibles was a groundbreaking movie for its time. At the time with CGI on the rise with the success of films like Toy Story and Shrek, they still struggled with the fact that CGI was, simply put, not good with human-character models. Even some of the earlier contenders at the Oscars like Jimmy Neutron and Monsters Inc still struggled with human anatomy and movement. They still work in other ways due to writing, storytelling, and comedy, but by the time The Incredibles got made, they finally cracked the code and were able to make human designs in CGI more appealing and add more fluid movement. In addition, they were able to incorporate more dynamic set pieces without having to rely on more cartoonish designs or worry about the texture work. Toy Story and A Bug’s Life were made at the time, because they couldn’t quite get past the plastic texture of the models. Finding Nemo was another big step forward, but even then, humans were used sparingly throughout in order to focus on the fish. Shrek 2 was also a leap forward, and while it had a solid romantic comedy plot to work on, The Incredibles was an original project with groundbreaking animation upgrades and a memorable story about a father who yearns for the days when superheroes weren’t outlawed and feels the stress of carrying the world and his family on his shoulders. There is a reason why most people, even now years later, say this win was warranted. Sure, there are individual years where Disney shouldn’t have won and showed the voters’ bias towards the company and animation as a whole, but The Incredibles didn’t have much competition that could rival or beat it when it came out at the time. With so many studios from the US and overseas making animated features with easier access to overseas animated features now, Disney and Pixar rightfully have competition and a more varied voting base that doesn’t have to constantly vote for these studios because now the voters have taste or patience to watch other nominees. Back then? Not so much. 

So, how do all of these observations relate to how Shark Tale got nominated? The film was a financial hit, but not a critically beloved one nor very award-friendly either. It was a cynical undertaking that ended up tanking DreamWorks’ reputation as a studio for many film and animation fans. Against better competition, Shark Tale still got into the Oscars, even if it had no real chance of winning. Simply put, it was a literal participation trophy. It was nothing more than a placeholder, because they needed three films to fit the category due to a lack of submissions. That’s the boring reality of it all. The reasons why most films get nominated aren’t all that interesting. They tend to be chosen because they got the most acclaim, made an impact within the film world, and/or they had a really good For Your Consideration campaign that got them nominated, or by other questionable means. Shark Tale got in because of animation bias, and the fact that the voters weren’t going to just let it be a fight between DreamWorks and Pixar. Having to split the vote with the few folks who maybe liked Shark Tale is what could have killed the momentum of Shrek 2 in the voting process. The only really interesting legacy of Shark Tale is that one of the directors of the film, Bibo Bergeron, was arrested in 2019 for harassment and assault charges. It also stands as the lowest rated animated film to be nominated for Best Animated Feature standing at a ghastly 35% on Rotten Tomatoes. Besides being a bad movie made cynically to try and be as hip, with it, and for “modern” audiences as possible, Shark Tale just isn’t all that worth remembering. Its Oscar-nomination was just handed to it due to really boring and tedious circumstances. It didn’t look great for 2004, it wasn’t funny enough to be charming, it didn’t have a real identity to it outside of trying to ride the coattails of Finding Nemo’s acclaim and success, and it isn’t bad enough to be a fun watch when you are bombarded with pop culture references, annoying characters, unappealing designs, and convoluted jokes. And then there are the people on Tik Tok who will try to take clips from bad movies like this one and say something asinine like “no one understood this masterpiece” or “you know a movie is good when it slips in background gags”. Bad movies sometimes get lucky at the Oscars, just not lucky enough to win most of the time.