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Netflix’s The Sea Beast shows how far animation has come — and what it still needs
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Moana and Big Hero 6 co-director Chris Williams brings the Disney and DreamWorks energy to a familiar film
I n In the early days of feature-length computer animation, there was an unofficial list of objects and textures that were notoriously difficult to master, with hair, water, and human faces chief among them. Netflix’s new animated feature The Sea Beast shows how far the medium has come over the last few decades — but it simultaneously shows how uninspired big-budget animation can still look, sometimes moments after it delivers a visual wow.
Specifically, this ocean-set adventure story deploys mega-gallons of computer-animated water with great skill. On the surface, as hunter ships prowl the sea for fearsome beasts that supposedly threaten humanity, the water shimmers and churns. Underneath, when sailors are occasionally dragged down to face enormous, kaiju-esque creatures, the murk creates a spare, ethereal beauty. The creatures themselves are a wonder of economical design: cartoony enough for readable expressions, imposing enough to put a good, momentary scare into smaller audience members.
So why is every human in this overpopulated story so dull to look at? The most distinctive by default is Maisie Brumble (Zaris-Angel Hator), a young orphan who reads of heroic beast-hunters and dreams of joining them on the high seas. She’s a Black girl, which ensures that she doesn’t look exactly like every other plucky young animated hero. But in general, the Sea Beast approach to human designs is to imitate recent Disney features like Moana or Encanto and make their eyes a bit smaller. Jacob Holland (Karl Urban), the strapping sailor who becomes Maisie’s reluctant guardian when she stows away on his monster-hunting ship, isn’t a caricature of swashbuckling masculinity or a clever visual variation on a familiar theme. He’s just a generic-brand version of a Disney hero.
It’s understandable that a Disney influence would inform so much of The Sea Beast . Its director, Chris Williams, is a two-decade veteran of Walt Disney Animation Studios, where he was on directing teams responsible for Bolt , Big Hero 6 , and Moana. He also worked as part of Disney’s story trust on many other projects. There’s a bit of Moana in this story of an expert sailor mentoring and learning from a curly-haired youngster, as well as a dash of Pirates of the Caribbean , where rougher-hewn sailors are challenged by soldiers of the crown who want to take over the job of monster hunting.
Outside the Disney sphere (though not worlds away), there are strong overtones of How to Train Your Dragon , where a pre-industrial society lived in fear of fantastical creatures. When Jacob and Maisie are separated from their crew, they come face to face with a massive horned beast (possibly amphibian, given its dexterity both in water and on land), who Maisie nicknames Red, after its bright skin color. Though the creature isn’t as puppyish as Dragon ’s Toothless, its response to the protagonists challenges some assumptions about these sea creatures, stemming from old-timey maps and Maisie’s supposedly true-life storybooks.
None of this is bad material for a children’s animated feature, and The Sea Beast offers several breaks from tedious recent trends in animation. The dialogue is written and performed in a vernacular that reaches for a kind of offhand, English-accented poetry — the sea beasts, for example, are described as “nature’s darkest design.” Though the language doesn’t always hit the mark, it’s almost completely free of tinny sarcasm and faux-comic placeholders. (“Awkward!” “Well, that happened,” and the like.) Similarly, the grandeur of the movie’s strongest visuals is allowed to stand on its own, favoring painterly compositions of the ocean’s frightening vastness over busy, desperate-to-please antics.
But maybe Williams and his crew could have been a little more eager to please. At times, The Sea Beast moves at a sluggish pace. After Maisie is introduced in her first brief scene, for example, she disappears from the movie for a stretch, slowing the film’s momentum. (My 6-year-old: “It seems like the hunters are the main characters, not the girl.”) Later on, the movie decelerates again for some speechifying, and in general greatly overestimates audience interest in Captain Crow (Jared Harris), a vaguely Ahab-like figure obsessed with getting revenge on the giant creature that has so long eluded him.
Captain Crow is an issue for the film: He isn’t interesting to look at, he isn’t much fun to be around, and he’s too human to function as a genuinely deranged villain. The movie’s nearly two-hour run time illustrates the pervasiveness of Netflix bloat more than the complexity of its themes, which are pretty familiar, in spite of the elevated language.
It’s difficult to tell whether Netflix’s feature animation will eventually develop its own identity. For now, there’s one more comparison that applies to The Sea Beast : With its lush animation of mostly dull characters, it recalls the early 2D films from DreamWorks, before Shrek hastened its pivot away from hand-drawn cartoons. Like The Prince of Egypt or Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas before it, The Sea Beast ditches talking animals and funny sidekicks, but it can’t fully shake off its Disney influences. It’s a whole lot of well-animated beasts and water, with nowhere to flow.
The Sea Beast is streaming on Netflix now.
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The sea monster Brickleback tangles with the hunting ship Inevitable in “The Sea Beast.”
Jacob (Karl Urban) and Maisie (Zaris-Angel Hator) in “The Sea Beast.”
Maisie (Zaris-Angel Hator) making a new friend in “The Sea Beast.”
Jacob (Karl Urban) and the creature known as the Red Bluster in “The Sea Beast.”
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Maisie Bramble is introduced early in “ The Sea Beast ” as a bit of a rule breaker.
Obsessed with the seafaring hunters who traverse oceans tracking and killing giant sea monsters, Maisie (voiced by Zaris-Angel Hator) is first shown regaling her fellow orphans with stories about these warriors’ heroics by candlelight before the children are caught breaking curfew. It’s also hinted that she routinely breaks out of the children’s home.
Maisie “is just a force of nature,” said “The Sea Beast” director Chris Williams during a recent phone call. She’s “a character that is absolutely determined to go after what she wants. And if she sees an obstacle, she’ll go through it, around it, under it, but she will achieve what she’s after.”
Action-packed, gorgeously animated and actually about something, “The Sea Beast” sets the early pace in the Oscar race.
A sweeping animated action adventure, “The Sea Beast,” now streaming on Netflix, is set in a world where terrifying sea monsters terrorizing ships and coastal towns have led to the rise of maritime hunters that protect the defenseless populace. Maisie’s goal is to join the crew of a hunting ship in order to “live a great life” fighting these giant sea beasts, much like her parents did before they died.
Partly inspired by old nautical maps that feature illustrations of sea monsters , “The Sea Beast” channels the spirit of the types of films that Willams loved most as a kid. The Academy Award-winning director of “ Big Hero 6 ” cites “King Kong,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and stop-motion innovator Ray Harryhausen’s “Sinbad” films and “Clash of the Titans” as among the works that sparked his affinity for fantastic adventure stories and desire to be a filmmaker.
“I love the movies where characters leave the known world and adventure into the unknown,” said Williams, who also co-wrote “The Sea Beast” screenplay with Nell Benjamin. “Something about the uncharted islands; the mysteries that lay beyond the horizon. That was always very compelling to me.”
In some ways, “The Sea Beast” was also an adventure into the unknown for Williams (beyond the fact that production took place during a pandemic). The Netflix film is the veteran filmmaker’s first feature outside of Walt Disney Animation, where he worked for 25 years. Besides 2014’s “Big Hero 6,” Williams’ most notable Disney credits include directing “ Bolt ” (2008) and serving as a co-director on “ Moana ” (2016).
While “The Sea Beast” may boast more swashbuckling action sequences than any of his previous films — as well as a roster of both vicious and adorable sea creatures — it’s still a story with plenty of heart. Central to the film is the relationship between young Maisie and Jacob Holland (Karl Urban), a decorated hunter whose adventures Maisie has read about in her books.
‘Lightyear’ features the first queer Pixar character shown kissing her wife on screen. The filmmakers explain how she was key to the the movie.
Jacob and the crew of the hunting ship Inevitable, led by the legendary Captain Crow (Jared Harris), are among Maisie’s idols. Williams describes Jacob as “the prototypical action hero” — he’s capable, courageous, respected by his fellow hunters and has a good heart. And having grown up on a hunting ship, Jacob knows firsthand that life out on the sea is not really suitable for most children.
But beyond the potential excitement and accolades associated with the job, Maisie’s fixation on hunters and their history is also a connection to her parents’ legacy. So she’s not going to be easily deterred.
“When [Maisie] determines that Jacob is not going to be helpful, and is in fact an obstacle … she knocks Jacob back on his heels, which he is not accustomed to,” said Williams while explaining Maisie as the perfect foil for a character like Jacob.
Beyond the visual spectacles of massive ships, crews battling giant monsters and action sequences both above and underwater, “The Sea Beast” engages with broader themes about heroism and history as Maisie, being younger and more open-minded than her hunter role models, starts to question everything she thought she knew about the war between humans and sea monsters.
These stories Maisie has pored over are “very powerful tools of propaganda” that present just one point of view about what has been happening out in the ocean. It’s only after Maisie goes out to sea and discovers that reality is much more complicated that she is able to reconsider the stories that inspired her.
Maisie is “someone who is still fixated on the idea of going after what she thinks is right, but her sense of right and wrong evolves dramatically over the course of the story,” said Williams, who explained part of the reason she is able to adapt her thinking is because she is still young. Captain Crow and Jacob are more set in their ideology.
“It takes a lot for someone, once they’ve been indoctrinated, to deprogram them, and that’s a lot of what the story is about,” said Williams. “We’re depicting this idea that the younger you are, the more nimble you tend to be and the less fixed you are in your worldview.”
The theme feels particularly timely as right-wing politicians and conservative activists in numerous states have increased their efforts to ban children’s access to certain library books and bar certain subjects and history from being taught in school.
“It’s critical who’s in control of the stories and who gets to say what the truth is in our history,” said Williams, who was saddened by seeing these themes become more relevant while “The Sea Beast” was in production.
Although the film is “ultimately meant to be a very fun action adventure spectacle,” added Williams, “as an artist, you always hope in some small way that you can give people a framework for thinking about these [larger themes]. Your humble hope is that you can make some difference in the world.”
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I have now and have had for about 3 or 4 years (I'm almost 18 now), a sexual and sometimes romantic attraction to certain animals. It started when I started playing D&D at a friend's house, and I met his dog. I've always been much more comfortable with animals than with humans, I had a neglectful childhood and so I always hung out with my cats and dog a lot. Anyway, for some reason I really liked his dog, how sleek she was, how smooth and how friendly she was. I came back again to play D&D more, but my attention was always distracted by her. Eventually, when I was petting her side one afternoon, she moved herself so that her rear was facing me and she started rubbing herself on me. It was really surprising and embarrassing and the rest of the people there had a good laugh because apparently it's a reasonably frequent occurrence since she isn't spayed. However, I was incredibly aroused. Needless to say, I was extremely conflicted about the whole experience when I thought about it later. I knew and still know that it's entirely unethical to have sexual contact with an animal, and my attraction to my friend's dog made me feel extremely gross about myself and it still does to some extent. I kept going to my friend's house for D&D, but I felt so conflicted about being around his dog that I stopped interacting with it, I forced myself to ignore her, and when that didn't work I stopped coming to D&D at all. The thing is, I started to miss her, I would have dreams of walking with her in the snow. It made me very distressed to be away from this dog, and I realised that I had a romantic attraction to her, even though she has no way of reciprocating it, which is crazy. I'm still to this day pretty disgusted by my attraction and I have never and nor do I ever intend on engaging in any softball of sexual activity with an animal. I sometimes still get urges, but I try to bury them or I make a confession here. I want to talk to my counsellor about it but I'm scared that she'll section me or somethi
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