The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson dedicates the picture to Jacques Cousteau, and Steve Zissou’s red cap and uniformed crew come straight off Cousteau’s ships. Most of the work was done at Cinecittà in Rome, with exteriors around Ponza and Naples. The Belafonte was no miniature: a real minesweeper, built for the Royal Navy and later serving the South African navy, was bought in Cape Town and shipped to Italy, and a stage set sliced the same vessel open from bow to stern. Everything below the waterline is stop motion. Henry Selick’s unit cast the puppets in silicone rather than foam latex and shot the animation on ILM’s motion control stages, which is why the fish look deliberately unreal. Seu Jorge, as the crewman Pelé dos Santos, sings David Bowie songs in Portuguese with nothing but an acoustic guitar; Bowie later wrote that without those recordings he would never have heard that beauty in his own songs. Against a budget of 50 million dollars the film took roughly 35 million worldwide, and opening audiences graded it a D on CinemaScore. A good fit if you want the grief kept under the jokes and the payoff saved for one nearly silent submersible scene. Not for anyone who needs the ocean to look like an ocean, or who will resist hand moved fish.