‘The Sea Beast’ Film Review: Netflix Animated Feature Feels Both Sloppy and Stylish at Every Level

thewrap.com:

The results of the departure are less impressive in Williams’’ case, but there’s still a notable maturity to “The Sea Beast” that could have clashed with the mostly sanitized storytelling that currently dominates Disney.

Sailors drink their pints and bleed when injured.But though one can appreciate Williams’ and Benjamin’s interest in crafting a philosophically layered fable, there’s a righteousness to the message of “You must change!” that blindsides the adult characters.

In the expansive duration of “The Sea Beast,” the creators didn’t find time to examine why Captain Crow and Jacob behave the way they do, instead demanding they abandon their ways without much compassion for their respective trauma and loss that prompted them to hold those beliefs in the first place.In its final act, the story is so quickly and seemingly neatly wrapped that we don’t even get a resolution on Captain Crow’s destiny once he realizes that killing the large creatures is wrong. “The Sea Beast” also presents a character like Sarah Sharpe (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a Black woman officer, with little depth of character beyond her loyalty.For all their efforts to show us that non-human entities are individuals that experience physical and psychological pain, and in turn using that as a metaphor for our biases towards those we don’t know, the filmmakers emotionally shortchange most of their human protagonists.

The touching exception being Maisie, whose defined arc as someone willing to question what she thought to be true, even though her parents presumably died as heroes, exemplifies the ideal mindset.