Help! I'm a Fish

'Help! I'm a Fish (known in the US as A Fish Tale') is a 2000 animated Danish film directed by Stefan Fjeldmark. The movie follows the adventure of three children named Fly, Chuck and Stella as they drink a fish potion and later find themselves in a watery adventure. Soon after the children are in the water, they must now fight against the evil Joe and reclaim the antidote if they want to turn human again...and they have only 48 hours, or they will be fish forever!

Plot
The film opens with a boy named Fly, who is making a new fishhook. When he's on his way out to go fishing, Aunt Anna and her son who is Fly's cousin, Charles (nicknamed Chuck) arrive, and Fly's mom Lisa tells him that she and her husband Bill are going out, and Anna is babysitting Fly's little sister, Stella. When Anna falls asleep, Fly is trying to make the best of the chance he has, and sneaks out with a still awake Stella, and an unwilling Chuck to the beach. There they find a seahorse which Stella names "Sasha", before she reluctantly throws her out in the ocean again.

The tide arrives and the three children find an underground tunnel which leads them to a science lab where they meet the mad professor MacKrill, where he tells Fly and Chuck (Stella had gone to find something to drink because she was thirsty) about how he has made a fish potion to make it possible for a human to become a fish and live underwater. While the professor tells Fly and Chuck about the antidote, Stella finds the fish potion, drinks it mistaking it for lemonade and becomes a starfish. While Fly, Chuck and the professor search for Stella, right when Fly is about to throw Stella (not knowing she is a starfish), Chuck tries in vain to tell Fly not to throw her, but he's too late.

Right after, they travel out in the ocean and since they can't see her, Fly decides that in order to find and save his sister, he must become a fish himself. So he drinks the potion and swims out in the ocean, becoming a Californian fly fish, while Chuck becomes a jellyfish. The professor drowns. Soon after, a pilot fish named Joe, after tasting a bit of the antidote, starts to build an empire with the antidote along with his bodyguard, Shark. When the children reunite, they learn that Chuck can't swim and had to drink the potion so he could survive. Fly also learns that when the storm got stronger, the potion was lost.

They hear other fish talking, and they learn that Joe is an icon thanks to the antidote. They decide to retrieve the bottle from Joe, but they have a very difficult time during that. They are sent to prison where Fly tries to tease a crab who guards the key. They get it and they manage to fool the crab into attacking Joe, while they escape. Now focused on returning home, Fly decides to make the antidote on their own, and the get all the ingredients. Meanwhile, the parents are looking for the children after finding out that they are gone, and they learn from the professor (having survived the storm) that they are now fish and are somewhere in the ocean.

At the same time in the ocean, right after getting the antidote ready, Joe arrives with his whole army of fish and crabs, but Shark is furious when Joe is trying to persuade Fly to take the role as leader of the army of "idiot" fish, when Crab intervenes and says that he is more suitable for that job than Fly, so Shark grabs Joe and prevents him from following the children. But Crab (having a score to settle with Fly from what happened in the prison), grabs the antidote container Fly holds, then they have a short standoff, resulting in Crab drinking the antidote and gains hands, while Fly is severely injured by Crab's attack, leaving him dying, weak and just negative (in the beginning, Chuck was negative, but the roles changed after Fly lost against Crab).

It is then up to Chuck to get them out of the ocean and back to the human world. Before going in the pipe to the professor, he tells Stella to say goodbye to Sasha, since she cannot come with them. Joe, now free from Shark's grip, pursues them into the pipe. In the lab, Chuck fights off the piranhas, while Fly has a showdown against Joe, tricking him into drinking so much that he turns into a human and drowns. Then Chuck and Stella are seen drinking the antidote, while Fly doesn't drink any. When everyone thinks he is dead, as Chuck mistakes a model of a regular Californian fly fish for him, he emerges from the water pipes, with a broken leg (thanks to Crab's punch while Fly was a fish), revealing he did drink the antidote in time after all.

The next day, Chuck and the professor have invented a water-slide, while Stella misses Sasha. When they see that she arrives in a sand castle Stella made, they decide to turn Sasha into a real horse, and while Stella rides Sasha, the song "I'm a Little Yellow Fish in the Deep Blue Sea" plays.

Cast

 * Fly - Jeff Pace
 * Stella - Michelle Westerson
 * Chuck - Aaron Paul
 * Professor MacKrill - Terry Jones
 * Joe - Alan Rickman
 * Shark - David Bateson
 * Sasha - Louise Fribo
 * Crab - David Bateson
 * Bill - John Payne
 * Lisa - Teryl Rothery
 * Aunt Anna - Pauline Newstone
 * Bus Driver - Richard Newman
 * Sea Bass - Scott McNeil

About the movie
Category: Animation, Comedy, Adventure

Age: 18+

Language: English, Danish, Norwegian, German, Japanese

Running Time: 79 min