Help! I'm a Fish also known as A Fish Tale is an animated Science Fantasy feature film from 2000 by the Danish animation company A. Film, although it was originally released, produced and recorded in English in an attempt to increase revenue. It was later released in Danish under the title "Hjælp, jeg er en fisk". Despite the English original cast, it wasn't until 2006 that it came to U.S. shores, under the title A Fish Tale. Not to mention it had really sucky cover art. The English voice cast certainly wasn't something to sneeze at though, boasting of cast members such as Terry Jones in a supporting role and Alan Rickman as the Big Bad (and a pre-fame Aaron Paul as one of the main characters as well as Agent 47 himself, David Bateson in two supporting roles).

This is the plight of the young troublemaker Fly, his cheerful younger sister Stella, and their overweight, nerdy cousin Chuck, who stumble across the laboratory of an eccentric professor, named MacKrill. The professor, more than happy to have a audience to show off his Weird Science inventions to, boasts to Fly and Chuck about his greatest discovery; the so-called "Fish Potion", which can transform people to sea creatures. Unfortunately, Stella, in an unattended moment, mistakes the potion for a drink, and takes a swig of it, transforming her into a starfish. In the ensuing confusion, she accidentally gets thrown out of a window into the sea by Fly, and only upon consulting a video tape do the other three find out what happened to her. Whilst searching the sea for Stella though, a storm brews up, and in a moment of hotheadedness, Fly drinks the potion, turning into a fish himself. A few moments later the boat capsizes, and to save himself from drowning, Chuck drinks the potion, whilst MacKrill seemingly drowns. Although things seem hopeless, the professor did make an antidote, but as luck would have it, it was tossed into the ocean when the boat capsized, and is now in the hands of Joe — a megalomaniac pilot fish, who plans to harness the power of the human intellect and use it to control the other fish.

Oh, and did we mention that if Fly, Chuck, and Stella don't get the antidote in 48 hours, they'll be stuck as fish forever?

Help! I'm a Fish contains examples of:

• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: The CGI is cel-shaded, so it isn't always as conspicuous. The giant octopus is fairly sticky-outy, though.
• Absent-Minded Professor: Professor MacKrill, to the extent that he needs to write a song to help him remember the ingredients to his own chemical concoction. Becomes a plot point when he nearly forgets to grab the antidote before his transformation, causing him to have to run off to grab it and leaving Stella unsupervised with the fish potion.
• Accidental Hero: MacKrill inadvertently serves as this back at the surface before the climax by using a suction device which decimates the Crab's army by sucking them all up after the Crab injures Fly, while Shark also ends up getting stuck in the suction tube after eating the Crab.
• Actor Allusion: When setting out to find the now-fish-ified kids, Professor MacKrill (Terry Jones) sings to himself that he must "find the fish".
• Advanced Tech 2000: Chuck's computer is a super-advanced "Millennium 2000 PMX".
• Alas, Poor Villain: Fly is visibly disturbed by the act of tricking Joe into killing himself.
• All Girls Like Ponies: Stella; she also loves her Seahorse Steed Sasha. At the end of the movie, she's overjoyed when MacKrill manages to turn Sasha into a land pony.
• Animal Talk: Averted. Even though Fly, Chuck, and Stella have been turned into fish, they can't speak with other fish except ones that have been exposed to the antidote.
• Animorphism: The main premise of the movie revolves around the main cast turning into ocean animals and trying to turn back into humans.
• Anthropomorphic Transformation: The fish potion's antidote not only makes fish more intelligent, but it also gives them a more cartoony and anthropomorphic design. It can also transform them into humans (mostly, anyway), as Joe finds out the hard way.
• Artistic License – Biology: Granted this is a children's film, but:
  • The Forced Transformation purpose of Professor MacKrill consists of a bunch of random aquatic ingredients which can somehow perfectly change a human into a fish, also allowing them to speak perfect English and maintain certain physical characteristics (hair, glasses, a skirt). The antidote reverses this, but if an actual fish drinks it, they gain human intelligence. If they keep drinking it, they turn into deformed humans, as what happens to Joe.
  • Mixing a seahorse and a horse's DNA in the film can create a perfect fusion of the both, even though neither of them are even close to being the same species.
  • Piranhas are freshwater fish - they apparently are able to survive long enough in saltwater.
  • Despite their name, starfish and jellyfish are NOT actually fish even though the film treats them as such with Stella and Chuck turning into them.
  • Stella and Chuck retain their intelligence despite starfish and jellyfish physically lacking brains.
  • Near the beginning of the movie, Chuck identifies Sasha as a "Hippocampus vulgaris". Not only is this not a real species, it's also Latin for "generic seahorse".
  • For some bizarre reason, MacKrill's model to demonstrate global warming places a bunch of penguin models on the top of the globe.
• Artistic License – Geology: The professor's claim that all habitable land would be lost if the polar ice caps melted. Even if that happened, even if the ice covering Antarctica, Greenland and the mountain glaciers melted, the simple answer is, no. While we would indeed lose numerous coastal cities, it is simply inaccurate to say that the entire world would flood. Sea levels would only rise about 70 meters (230 feet). But many cities, such as Denver, would survive. Then again, MacKrill seems to be a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander.
• Artistic License – Physics: According to Joe, if massive matter was made to move at the speed of light, it would turn into pure energy; massive matter actually can't reach the speed of light at all. Granted, between this and the nonsensical answer to the Chicken-and-Egg Paradox, it's likely that he hit the point where the antidote stopped conferring new knowledge (at least not new knowledge about physics).
• Asimov's Three Kinds of Science Fiction: One of Professor MacKrill's Weird Science inventions is a potion that turns people into fish. It's never seen how it works or the creation process. Rather, MacKrill's lack of safety measures gives a curious little girl easy access to it. This forces her big brother and cousin to use the very same potion to retrieve the antidote from the depths of the ocean. Therefore, it's categorized as an Adventure kind of Sci-Fi story.
• Asshole Victim: The Crab spends his last moments just boasting about how he is the new "king", and then quickly gets eaten by the Shark to no one's grief. It doesn't help that he almost mortally wounded Fly and tried to kill the kids just before that.
• Bad Boss: Joe. He fires Shark, insults Crab, and orders for their execution for their failures (although he then changes his mind) and that's not getting into how Shark is allowed to eat sentient fish in Joe's empire and how he orders his troops to construct a statue in his likeness. Near the end of the movie, his mistreatment of both Shark and Crab causes trouble for him and his plans.
• Bamboo Technology: Joe's underwater society manages to use fishpower to replicate a lot of modern technology- examples include a conveyor belt of moving flatfish, and a "telephone" with a small fish in it that buzzes off to relate what you said to whoever's on the other end.
• Bewitched Amphibians: While trying to bluff the guard-crab, Fly threatens to "use [his] magic powers to turn [him] into a frog". Crab, however, has fallen asleep and doesn't even hear the fake threat.
• Big Bad: Joe. He gets a hold of the antidote that the heroes need after they've all been turned into sea creatures, and uses it for his own desires.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Crab proclaims himself the new king of the ocean after knocking Fly down and drinking the last potion, but only briefly takes charge of the army of crabs before his army is decimated by an underwater cyclone (caused by MacKrill's suction machine) and gets eaten by Shark due to his own smug attitude.
• Big Electric Switch: Just before transforming into a starfish, Stella knocks against one of these, which controls the pump that circulates seawater through all of MacKrill's tanks. Her turning it off sets off an alarm in the lab, too.
• Big "NO!": Chuck lets out a truly distraught pair of "NO!"s when it looks like Anna has just stepped on a dead Fly.
• Big, Thin, Short Trio: Chuck is pretty heavyset, Fly is tall and skinny, and Stella is a tiny child who barely comes up to Fly's waist.
• Birdcaged: After being captured, Stella, Fly, and Chuck are kept in an actual sunken birdcage- which comes complete with a perch.
• Black Bead Eyes: "Normal" fish (including Sasha) have solid black eyes, to differentiate them from intelligent fish that have consumed the potion, which all have more detailed and human-like eyes.
• Black Comedy: Shark's habit of eating fully sentient creatures, which would be utterly terrifying if it weren't played for (very dark) laughs.
• Bizarrchitecture: Professor MacKrill's lab looks like a slightly smaller version of the Finch house, stuck atop a boat.
• Blowing a Raspberry: Chuck does this to some piranhas in the climax to taunt them.
• Body Horror: When Joe drinks too much of the antidote, bones sprout out from his back and arms, he develops a tumor like growth on his head, his skin starts to rip and slough off and his teeth become crooked and a few even fall out.
• Cargo Concealment Caper: In order to get close to Joe, the fish kids hide inside a sardine tin that was bringing him supplies for his demonstration.
• Catapult Nightmare: Anna sits up in bed shouting "Charles!" after apparently having one of these; we never see her dream, but it's very fitting since the movie cuts to her immediately after Chuck falls off the rowboat and has to take the potion.
• Celestial Deadline: Those who don't turn back to normal within 48 hours of the fish transformation will stay fish forever.
• Chekhov's Boomerang: The video recorder comes back into the plot twice. Initially intended to record Professor MacKrill turning into a fish, it also ends up recording Stella turning into a starfish. The first time around allows Chuck to find out (too late) what happened to Stella, and the second time around it's used as proof of the children's state when Anna and Fly's parents aggressively interrogate Professor MacKrill.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Fly's fishing lure. It allows his family to track down where he, Stella and Chuck went once they go missing.
  • The model of a California Flyfish. It first serves as Foreshadowing to Fly's fish form, and is later mistaken for an unconscious, permanently fishified Fly.
  • H.O. MacKrill is such an Absent-Minded Professor that he needed to make a song to remember the parts to his own potion. The song is catchy enough that it turns out Fly can remember all the ingredients using it, allowing the fish kids to construct their own antidote.
  • Subverted with another part of the "Fishtastic" sequence, when MacKrill uses a mirror to scare an octopus and get it to produce ink. Fly tries to pull this on the giant octopus that grabs him late in the movie, but it doesn't work.
  • With Joe's bottle of antidote used up and their own new antidote consumed by General Crab, the kids realize that the bottle of antidote MacKrill had in his lab is still there, and that is, indeed, how they end up becoming human again.
  • Early in the movie, it's established that Professor MacKrill's lab has a pump system that circulates seawater to all his different tanks. Much later, the fish kids use the pump system to get back into the lab and get the bottle of antidote.
• Chicken-and-Egg Paradox: Referenced. The question that finally gets Joe to drink too much antidote is "What came first, the chicken or the egg?"
• Clamshell Currency: Apparently, riding the fish bus normally costs two clams and five stones; however, random clams that Fly picked up from the seafloor don't count of this.
• Clam Trap: Stella ends up being shut in a clam at one point during "Suddenly"; fortunately, Fly finds her and pries the clam open.
• Clingy Aquatic Life: When the kids get spat out of the tunnel in MacKrill's cave, Chuck has a jellyfish on his head. This also serves to foreshadow what he gets turned into later.
• Clipped-Wing Angel: After Joe drinks an awful lot of antidote and slowly transforms into a monstrous mockery of a human being, (see Body Horror above), seemingly having become a much more powerful and threatening creature, he loses his gills, which are now replaced by lungs, making him unable to breathe underwater anymore. Realizing this too late, he promptly drowns and dies, his deformed corpse washed away down the pipe.
• Clueless Phlebotinum Exposure: The plot kicks off when Professor MacKrill leaves his fish transformation potion unattended, and the young Stella mistakes it for lemonade and drinks it, turning into a starfish.
• Counterfeit Cash: An odd variant; when the fish kids try to get on the sea-bus, Fly takes the lenses out of Chuck's glasses and passes them off as "trans-atlantic, trans-pacific valid currency". He then exploits the driver's stupidity to get the lenses back, because, hey, Chuck needs them to see.
• Covers Always Lie: The U.S. DVD cover art◊ makes the film look like a Mockbuster of Finding Nemo. Even weirder, Alan Rickman's name is placed above the title, but his character isn't even shown on the cover. This solitary name also makes it sound like Rickman is the lead role. Or the shark.
• Cranial Eruption: At one point, Fly tricks General Crab (who had his shell pulled down over his eyes) into attacking Joe; when we next see Joe, he's got a red lump on his head.
• Defeat by Transformation: In the climax, Fly tricks Joe into drinking more of the potion so he can boost his intelligence further and more easily answer Fly's questions. The potion ultimately turns Joe into a human... whereupon Joe figures out that humans cannot breathe underwater at the very second the potion removes his gills. He immediately drowns.
• Demorphing Denouement: The fish kids do end up returning to their human forms at the end of the movie, although there's some brief tension when it looks like Fly doesn't make it.
• Deranged Animation: Stella's "turning-into-a-starfish" sequence is very different from the rest of the movie - when she drinks the fish potion, the perspective around her becomes distorted and Stella begins to fall backwards as the background also distorts and shatters, followed by even more distorted background images and visions of her surroundings rapidly zooming in and fading out before everything finally settles, ending with Stella falling over and fainting.
• Deus ex 'Scuse Me: The second before he would've downed some fish potion for his demonstration, MacKrill realizes that he forgot to grab the antidote and leaves to get it, while setting the potion down. This allows a thirsty Stella to mistake it for lemonade, drink it, and get turned into a starfish.
• Disney Death:
  • MacKrill nearly drowns during the storm but fortunately survives. The main characters, however, think he did.
  • Near the end of the film, Chuck believes Fly is still a fish and has died. He tries to put the fish in a bowl full of water, but it does no good. His mother tries to help out, but a desperate Chuck gets very angry and then slips, accidentally dropping the fish in the process and then having his mother step on it. Seconds later, Fly emerges from nearby boxes, now back in his human form. Later, Anna finds out that the fish she stepped on is the same stuffed fish Fly examined earlier.
• Ditzy Genius:
  • Joe might be quite smart for a fish, but his logic can sometimes be messed up that when he drinks the antidote, he forgets that humans can't breathe underwater.
  • Professor MacKrill is obviously a genius scientist and his potion is brilliant, but the man himself... isn't all there.
• The Dog Bites Back: Late in the movie, Joe fires Shark for his continuous stupidity; this results in Shark grabbing Joe and demanding to renegotiate before Joe could snatch the new antidote away from the kids.
• A Dog Named "Dog": A great white shark named Shark and a crab named... well, Crab.
• Do Not Touch the Funnel Cloud: An underwater version, but nonetheless seems to work under the same principles. The "underwater tornado" does not appear dangerous until it gets close enough to suck its victims in.
• The Dragon: Both Shark and the Crab are this to Joe. At first. Once Shark gets fired from his position by Joe and Crab gravely injures Fly and becomes more intelligent by drinking the antidote, they both rebel against Joe.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • When Chuck admits that he had to drink the potion because he couldn't swim, Fly asks him "Why didn't you say so before?"; he had said so a few times before, Fly just wasn't listening to him.
  • At one point, Bill is seen in a boat looking for Fly... directly over his son, who is on the seafloor having a confrontation with Joe.
• Dub Name Change:
  • The Japanese dub changes Fly's name to Tobi, from "tobu", meaning "to fly". Similarly, the movie itself is retitled "Tobi Wars".
  • In the French dub, MacKrill's name is Crevette, the French word for shrimp.
• Dumb Muscle: Shark. His DVD character profile states that the reason he puts up with Joe's poor treatment is simply because he does not have the brains to rebel.
• Ending Theme: The movie's end credits are long enough to have three songs accompanying them- a reprise of the title theme, "People Lovin' Me", and "Close Your Eyes".
• Ethereal Choir: One can be heard when the kids get back into MacKrill's lab and see the original bottle of antidote.
• "Eureka!" Moment: When Joe is escaping the flooded lab with the remaining antidote, Stella calls him a "stupid fish". This gives Fly the idea to go after Joe and trick him into drinking more antidote so that the latter can turn into a human underwater and drown.
  Stella: Fly! What are you doing?
  Fly: Using my brain! For once...
• Evil Overlooker: Joe and the Shark can be seen behind the main characters on the DVD cover above, the former sporting a sinister grin on his face.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Joe's gloating at his increased intelligence from drinking the antidote is cut short by horrified realization once it dawns on him that he's become a strictly air-breathing human deep underwater.
  Fly: Can a human breathe underwater?
  Joe: OF COURSE NOT-! (realizes he's just doomed himself, before proceeding to cease breathing and drown)
• Extremely Short Timespan: The majority of the film takes place within 48 hours, according to Professor Krill.
• Face Doodling: Near the beginning of the movie, Stella draws on a sleeping Aunt Anna’s face with makeup.
• Family-Unfriendly Death:
  • Joe, who also gets a Death by Irony. He turns into a human, but because he's underwater and humans cannot breathe underwater, he ends up drowning after realizing his mistake of drinking the antidote.
  • A lot of the (mostly sapient) fish that Shark eats over the course of the film suffer this as well, because Shark eats them alive and usually on-screen, with visible and audible chewing.
• Family-Unfriendly Violence: Fly gets injured by a giant sentient crab to the point of visibly bleeding.
• Fictional Video Game: At the end of the movie, Fly asks if he can delete any programs on Chuck’s computer so he has room to install Space Blaster.
• Finger-Tenting: Joe does this with his fins during his New Era Speech.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Fly and Chuck start out as two cousins who have absolutely nothing in common and see the other's company as something they have to put up with more than anything. By the end of the story, they've saved each other's life countless times, and have a newfound mutual respect that translates to a close friendship.
• Fishing for Sole: When Fly goes fishing at the beginning of the movie, he ends up pulling up a tin can... which has a seahorse trapped in it. Stella ends up taking the seahorse and naming her Sasha.
• Flyaway Shot: The movie ends with an aerial zoom-out of the beach, zoomed just far enough away that you can still, only barely, see Stella on the back of Land!Sasha.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Chuck is washed into MacKrill's lab, he has a jellyfish stuck on his head, which is what he will turn into later. Similarly, while in the lab, Fly comes across a stuffed fish labeled "California Flyfish", which looks exactly like the one he will turn into.
  • Fly and Stella's names were also foreshadowing what kind of fish they were going to turn into. Fly's was certainly more obvious, and the name Stella means "star".
  • When Fly is trying to take the antidote from Joe, Chuck warns him that they'll drown if they turn back into humans underwater. Guess how Joe is defeated?
  • A more subtle one, but when Joe drinks enough antidote to grow fingers, he also grows eyebrows and a hint of a human nose.
  • During the "Fishtastic" song, when Fly and Chuck walk behind a fish tank as they follow MacKrill, all of them have their heads completely obscured by the fishes inside the tank, one for each head. While Fly and Chuck don't turn into the same species that obscured their heads and MacKrill doesn't turn into a fish at all, the colorations do match (yellow for Fly, and blue for Chuck).
  • When the kids find Professor MacKrill's lab, Stella tells Fly that she's thirsty. Later, her thirst leads to her drinking the fish potion.
  • Before it's revealed that Professor MacKrill is actually nice, one shot depicts something ominously moving in a tank. Looking closely, you can tell it's an octopus- which has its ink taken later during "Fishtastic".
  • When Fly goes to put the "weird fish" (actually a transformed Stella) in a tank, he jerks his hand pack when some piranhas jump out of it. Much later, those piranhas reappear as a threat to the fish kids.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: When Fly unwittingly hits the Esc button on Chuck's laptop and causes the system to crash, there's a single frame that features the logo of a real (& now-obscure) game called Chase Ace 2 displayed on the monitor as it glitches out.
• Furry Confusion: Pointedly averted. Anthropomorphized fish are either humans who have been exposed to the fish potion or fish who have been exposed to the antidote. All other fish are realistic.
• Genius Serum: The antidote has an intellgience-and-knowledge-granting effect on uplifted marine life (though not on humans turned into fish, who just revert back).
• Giant Wall of Watery Doom: One of these ends up pushing the kids through the tunnel to MacKrill's lab when Chuck leaves the door open against the rising tide.
• Good-Times Montage: A catchy song called "Suddenly" accompanies a montage of Stella and Sasha (later joined by Fly) having fun.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Downplayed with the crab sent to guard the captured fish kids- he nearly falls for Fly's tricks several times but never completely falls for them, and while he does eventually fall asleep, he wakes up near-immediately when Sasha takes the keys from him.
• Guile Hero: Near the end, Fly saves the day by outwitting Joe. He tricks the latter into drinking enough antidote to turn himself into a human underwater, drowning as a result.
• Hands Looking Wrong: After her transformation, Stella is briefly seen looking in confusion at her lack-of-hands, although she doesn't verbally comment on it.
• Hard-Work Montage: A montage of the kids collecting ingredients for a new antidote (mixed with a few scenes of their parents searching for them) is set to "Do You Believe in Magic".
• Heroes Gone Fishing: Literal variation; the whole plot springs up from a fishing trip.
• Hit Stop: When General Crab slashes Fly with his claw, time briefly stops, and then continues in slow-motion with a Red Filter of Doom.
• Hollywood Healing: Downplayed. As a fish, Fly becomes weak from Crab injuring him and seemingly doesn't heal, but once he turns back into a human, he's quite fine aside from his leg being broken.
• Idiosyncratic Wipes: During the ingredient-collection montage, scenes are transitioned between by a school of fish swimming across the screen.
• If Only You Knew: When the kids are collecting ingredients, Chuck comments several times on how unlikely it is that they'll find an octopus, when in fact there's one watching them.
  Chuck: If we find an octopus, and I say "if"...
  (Zoom-out to show the octopus looking at them)
• I'm Cold... So Cold...: Fly. Justified due to him having (seemingly) lost quite a bit of blood.
• I Shall Taunt You:
  • Fly tries to goad Crab into snapping through the bars of the kids' cage by calling him weak, although much to Fly's horror he decides to break the key instead.
  • Late in the movie, Chuck taunts a school of piranhas to get them to rush at him, and then dodges, leaving them all stuck in the filter for their tank's outflow pipe.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Chuck's mother, Aunt Anna. While she seems like your typical "nasty, negligent aunt" in the opening, she proves herself to be fairly formidable in searching for her son, and softens up in the end.
• Just Desserts: Crab ends up getting eaten by Shark as they are getting sucked up a whirlpool.
• Karmic Death: After injuring Fly and consuming the potion, Crab and his army end up getting sucked into a whirlpool caused by MacKrill's suction device, before Shark eats him as he gets caught as well.
• Karmic Transformation: In a way, Chuck. He is a clever boy with a lot of nerdy and academic interests, but the fish potion turns him into a jellyfish, a creature that doesn't have a brain at all.
• LEGO Genetics: Random bits of ocean-stuff is enough to turn humans into fish, fish into humans, and, eventually, seahorses to actual horses. At one point during "Fishtastic", Professor MacKrill even looks through a microscope and sees a DNA molecule literally rearranging itself into a fish shape. (Granted, this happened during a song sequence so it's probably not supposed to be literal.)
• Lulled Themselves to Sleep: Aunt Anna tries to read a bedtime story to little Stella, but is having a hard time staying awake and the latter even tells her to read faster. Anna ends up falling asleep, allowing the kids Stella, Fly and Chuck to leave house unsupervised and progress the plot.
• Man-Made House Flood: In order to reach the original antidote, Chuck clogs the outflow vent of the piranha tank, causing the tank to overflow and allowing the fish kids to simply swim to the bottle.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": Fly, Chuck and Stella have one when they are trapped by the rising tide. And again when a massive amount of water starts flowing rapidly out of the cave entrance.
• Match Cut:
  • A rare auditory version occurs when General Crab marching while chanting "1-2-3-4-5-6" cuts to Bill and Lisa waltzing while saying "1... 2... 3..."
  • When Anna faints after seeing the video of Stella's transformation, the scene cuts to a broken baby doll sinking to the seafloor headfirst.
• Meaningful Name: Fly and Stella's names foreshadowed what kind of fish they were going to turn into.
• Mermanity Ensues: As the film's title suggests, the characters are turned into fish when they drink a potion.
• Missing Child: When Lisa, Bill and Anna find out their children have gone missing, they spend the second and third act of the film looking for them.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: One small tank in MacKrill's lab contains a half-rat-half-fish which Fly sees eating a block of cheese.
• Monumentally Important Founder: Joe decides that a giant statue of himself needs to be erected, and works the construction crew to near-exhaustion to do it.
• Mooks: Joe's army consists of a bunch of crabs that look a lot like General Crab, led by General Crab himself.
• Morphic Resonance: Each transformed character keeps at least one physical characteristic of their human form.
• Mouth Cam: Joe has the fish kids captured by having Shark eat them but not swallow them (which probably took all of his willpower); we get a few shots looking out from inside his mouth until he spits them out.
• New Era Speech: Joe makes a short one before his Villain Song. He even uses the phrase "new era" in it, too.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: After Fly is wounded and General Crab is able to drink some more antidote, Stella yells "help!"... which grabs General Crab's attention again, as he had gotten distracted.
• No Cartoon Fish: Partially averted. Simply put — Cartoon = Human/Fish that has been exposed to one of the potions. Not Cartoon = Not exposed to the potion.
• Non-Dubbed Grunts: Fly, Stella and Chuck's original Danish voice actors are listed in the English credits under "additional dialogue".
• Obviously Not Fine: After being seriously wounded by the Crab, Fly tells Stella "I'll be fine. Really." This is less out of personal denial and more out of trying to comfort her.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Chuck has one when he plays back the recording on MacKrill's video camera and realizes all too late that the starfish Fly is about to toss out the window into the ocean is actually Stella.
  • Joe gets a major one right before he kicks the bucket.
    Fly: Can a human breathe underwater?
  • Fly also has a moment like this before he's injured by the crab.
• Opening the Flood Gates: In the climax of the movie, Anna and Bill both open doors to MacKrill's flooded lab; this results not only in them being drenched, but in strong currents that nearly pull the kids away from the fish potion.
• Pet Gets the Keys: After Sasha is freed from her harness at the statue-building site, she goes to find Stella, who is able to convince her to grab the functional half of the key from General Crab.
• Placebo Eureka Moment: When Chuck fights off piranhas, Stella insults Joe while he's escaping by saying "You stupid, stupid fish!"- this inspires Fly to defeat Joe by insulting his intelligence and tricking him into drinking too much antidote.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: When Joe unleashes a horde of piranhas on the fish kids, before slipping down a pipe, he says this:
  Joe: So sorry. I can't stay for dinner.
• Professor Guinea Pig: MacKrill's demonstration of the fish potion involves him stepping into a fish tank, potion in hand, and asking for the results of whatever happens to him to be filmed on a video camera. Subverted in that he has to halt the experiment to fetch the antidote and leaves the fish potion out for someone else to grab...
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Joe's answer to the question "What happens to a fish that drinks too much antidote?" (granted, the pauses are probably less for emphasis and more because he's now struggling to breathe underwater).
  Joe: It. Becoooomes... (gasp) HUUUMAAN!
• Puff of Logic: Fly outsmarts Joe by asking him semi-complicated questions, leading Joe to drink more and more antidote, making him more and more human. By the point Joe has turned more or less fully human, Fly poses him the final question: "Can a human breathe underwater?" Joe answers "Of course not!" and immediately drowns.
• Race Against the Clock: If the kids don't get the antidote within 48 hours, they'll be stuck as fish forever.
• Rambling Old Man Monologue: Parodied at the "bus stop", with an elderly shrimp complaining about how things are all so different than they were... yesterday, before the antidote gave him and the other sea creatures intelligence.
• Rewritten Pop Version: "Do You Believe in Magic" is slightly different on the soundtrack album, including the addition of A Wild Rapper Appears!. Occasionally, this version is used on TV airings.
• Ribcage Stomach: The fish-bus seems to be entirely "empty space with a ribcage at the top" inside; Fly, Chuck, and Stella are even able to lean out the gill slits at one point.
• Scared of What's Behind You: When the octopus suddenly inks and swims away, Fly assumes that it was frightened away by Stella's high-pitched scream; it was actually scared off by Shark, who's approaching behind the kids.
• Scary Shiny Glasses: When we first see MacKrill, it's as a menacing figure with bright glasses behind a tank. His glasses immediately stop shining when he opens his mouth and we find out that he's friendly.
• Screw Learning, I Have Phlebotinum!: What ends up happening to any fish exposed to the Fish Antidote. At one point in the movie, you see Joe take a sip of the potion in order to solve a math problem.
• Seahorse Steed: Sasha the seahorse helps carry the main characters around. In the end, she is turned into an actual, land-bound pony.
• Shipshape Shipwreck:
  • Joe makes his base in the perfectly intact wreck of an ocean liner.
  • Downplayed with wreck MacKrill finds after surviving his rowboat sinking; it's been split in half and the mast breaks when he tries to grab onto it, but with how old it looks, it's surprising that even that much is left.
• Shout-Out:
  • The title of the movie is actually a reference to a certain strip from Calvin and Hobbes.
  • The main villain, Joe the pilot fish, seems disturbingly similar to The Joker from Batman's earlier animated series (who even had an episode about transforming fish to have his iconic Slasher Smile).
  • "You're forgetting something! The Force is with us!"
  • A shot at the beginning of the movie shows that Fly has a model TIE fighter and a poster of Darth Vader in his room.
  • A blink-and-you'll-miss-it-moment shows that Stella has a portrait of Totoro in her room.
  • MacKrill's lab has shark-shaped window patterns that appear to be specifically modeled on the poster from Jaws.
• Sibling Team: Fly and Stella are a serious oddity in the world of children's animation — not only do they still have both their parents, but they genuinely love each other! Who'da thunk?
• Sickening "Crunch!": In the commotion during Fly's Disney Death, Chuck slips and "Fly" goes into the air. Aunt Anna reaches up to catch him, drops him and accidentally steps on him, causing this noise.
• Slo Mo: The movie slows down when Chuck grabs for Starfish!Stella... and then speeds up again when he misses and Fly chucks the "weird fish" out the window to sea.
• Staircase Tumble: Trapped on the rock by the rising tide, Chuck leans against and accidentally opens a hidden door built into the cliff face (which Fly and Stella had already gone through), and goes falling down the flight of stairs behind it.
• Stealthy Cephalopod: Late in the movie, the kids have to deal with a giant-to-them octopus that is so stealthy, it's able to be right next to them while they talk about how unlikely it will be that they can find an octopus.
• Stock Animal Diet: The mouse-fish is seen eating Cartoon Cheese in its tank.
• Take My Hand!: During the storm, MacKrill shouts this to Chuck, who was washed overboard and can't swim. Chuck can't reach, meaning that the only option is to grab the fish potion (which was also washed overboard).
• Tentacled Terror: The kids have a very frightening encounter with a giant-to-them octopus at the end of the ingredient-collection sequence; the only reason it doesn't eat them is because it gets scared off by an approaching Shark.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics:
  • Skirt-wearing starfish? Alrighty then. Seeing how Fly keeps his hat and Chuck keeps his glasses, we should be more concerned that she has pigtails. Fish Fly is also seen to have hair throughout the movie.
  • The red female fish that accompany Joe during "Intelligence" all have eyelashes.
• This Is a Work of Fiction: The end credits contains a version of this disclaimer modified to say "people or fish".
• Threatening Shark: Joe's Dumb Muscle flunky is a great white shark who was exposed to the antidote at the same time he was.
• Through a Face Full of Fur: When Fly laughs at how Chuck got turned into a jellyfish, Chuck's entire body takes on a reddish tinge. (This gets used for a joke in the Danish version, as Fly calls Chuck a "vandmann" (blue/harmless jellyfish), and then "corrects" himself to "brandmann" (red/painful jellyfish) when Chuck changes colors.)
• Took a Level in Badass: Chuck starts out as Fly and Stella's nerdy cousin, being much more pessimistic about ever becoming human again compared to them. However, after Fly is severely injured, he takes charge by busting back into the lab and single-handedly fighting off the piranhas trying to stop them.
• Tom the Dark Lord: The name of our Big Bad, a Joker-looking, Alan Rickman-voiced maniac? Joe.
• Too Dumb to Fool: Fly tries to trick Crab into breaking the bars on the cage that he, Stella and Chuck are locked in by getting him to demonstrate his strength on them, but Crab thinks the bars aren't strong enough and breaks the key instead.
• Transformation Potion: Professor MacKrill invents a red potion that, when consumed, turns the consumer into a fish. Little Stella accidentally mistakes the potion for lemonade and turns herself into a starfish. Her big brother Fly and their cousin Chuck are forced to consume the potion themselves in order to find her after they throw her in the ocean before realizing what happened to her. The professor also remembered to invent an antidote, which is yellow, and has to be consumed within 48 hours in order to turn the consumer back into a human.
• Transformed Ever After: At the end of the film, Professor MacKrill uses his anti-fish potion to turn Sasha the seahorse into a land horse for little Stella's amusement.
• Transforming Conforming: The antidote created by MacKrill may turn humans turned into fishes back into humans again, but has the reversal effect on fishes, giving them intelligence and the ability to talk. However, when Fly tricks Joe into drinking more antidote, the fish mutates, turning into a heinous mockery of a human being. And humans can't breathe in the water...
• Turning Back Human: The fish kids' main goal is to find the antidote that will turn them back human within 48 hours (after that time, the antidote won't have any effects).
• Two Lines, No Waiting: The movie has the fish kids' undersea adventures as the A-plot, and their parents searching for them as the B-plot.
• Unnamed Parent: In the credits, Fly and Stella's parents are listed as "The Mother" and "The Father"... Even though their names, Lisa and Bill, are actually given in the movie.
• Uplifted Animal: Any fish exposed to the antidote gains human-like qualities including the ability of human speech and human intelligence. How human the fish becomes depends on how much antidote they're exposed to, unless it takes five sips to transform... with unpleasant results.
• Vertigo Effect: When Aunt Anna accidentally steps on what seems to be Fly in his fish form, the shots of both Lisa and Bill and Stella have this dolly zoom effect.
• Villain Song: "Intelligence", sung by Joe about how he will lead the newly-intelligent fish into a new era of dominance.
• Visual Pun: At one point, Joe is seen using a Bamboo Technology cell phone made out of a shell. It's a "shell phone", geddit?.
• Vocal Dissonance: Even though he's a kid, Chuck's voice sounds older.
• We Can Rule Together: Implied by Joe, when he's trying to weasel the anti-fish formula out of Fly, Chuck, and Stella. It's only an act however, as he plans to feed them all to Shark. He later makes a similar offer after firing Shark.
• Weirdness Censor: When Fly finds Starfish!Stella on the floor, he doesn't notice this starfish has pigtails and a skirt.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: It's never explained what happened to the other uplifted fish after Joe's death. It's possible MacKrill and Chuck may turn them back by pouring the fish potion into the nearby ocean, or that the effect may wear off over time.
• Widely-Spaced Jail Bars: After the fish kids get birdcaged, the bars are depicted wide enough that Stella could slip through them by turning sideways (and she even embraces Sasha through the bars at one point). Chuck could also probably squeeze through given how he has no bones.
• Yellow Eyes of Sneakiness: Joe, Shark, and the Crab all have bright yellow sclerae in contrast with the other fish in the movie. Joe keeps this trait when he becomes human.
• You Are What You Hate: Joe and the fish become hateful of being aquatic creatures forced to live in water, wishing to be more human and rise to the surface world.