Making his animation debut, De Niro admits, “I wasn’t sure about doing animation, but I was curious to see what it was about. I thought it would be interesting, and it turned out to be fun. Obviously, ‘Shark Tale’ is a take-off of certain movies… I play the head of the underwater underworld. He basically runs the whole deal down there. He has two sons, but he finds out that one of them doesn’t want to go into the ‘family business.’”
Bibo Bergeron comments, “Don Lino wants his two sons, Frankie and Lenny, to take over the business, but I think he’s in denial about Lenny. He loves both of his sons, and has big plans for them, so he doesn’t want to hear about anything that might put a crimp in those plans.”
There is more than a crimp put in Don Lino’s plans for his sons because his eldest, Frankie, was the shark who was “anchored away,” so to speak. Frankie is voiced by Michael Imperioli, who remarks, “Frankie is the rough, hot-headed son who wants to follow in his father’s footsteps. His younger brother, Lenny, is not really predatory, which is kind of an embarrassment to the family. Frankie cares about his brother, but he wants to toughen him up. He’s trying to get Lenny to sink his teeth into being a shark, so he takes him out to show him the ropes…to, as he says, ‘make pop happy.’”
“Frankie is a perfect eating machine, but he’s a little thick in the head,” Letterman concedes. “Michael Imperioli brought a great wise-guy voice to the part. He was very funny.”
When Frankie meets his untimely demise trying to show Lenny how to eat a fish—specifically Oscar—Lenny feels responsible for his brother’s death. Unable to face his father, he figures “if you can’t eat ‘em, join ‘em,” and runs away to the Reef, where he teams up with Oscar. Together they come up with an elaborate scheme to get them both off the hook.
Unfortunately for Oscar, Angie finds out that he is hiding a shark, and worse yet, Lenny bursts Angie’s bubble by revealing the truth about Oscar’s heroics. “When Angie discovers Lenny, I think she instantly realizes he is a gentle, sweet soul, and they forge an immediate friendship,” Jenson offers. “But then Oscar swims in, and that’s when trouble is going to start and Angie knows it. She sees right away that Oscar is not going to fess up to the truth. She tries to get him to do the right thing, but Oscar’s job seems to be to ignore Angie’s good advice, and he ends up doing exactly the opposite.”
If Angie is the angelfish on Oscar’s shoulder, he also has a devil on the other one in the form of Lola. “Angie is the best thing that could ever happen to Oscar, but he can’t see that because his view is being obstructed by Lola. She’s our femme fatale; she’s the most gorgeous fish on the Reef, but also the most dangerous, which Oscar learns the hard way,” Letterman says.
Lola is voiced by Angelina Jolie, who admits, “Lola is a bit of a gold digger. She paid no attention to Oscar when she thought he was a nobody, but when he becomes a somebody in her eyes, she tries to distract him from the real love of his life. She is quite shallow. I don’t know if I would have wanted to play her if she weren’t a fish, but as a fish, I love her,” she laughs.
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