The Sea Beast (2022)

Netflix's The Sea Beast arrives with the polished sheen of a studio animated adventure and the weary conscience of a film that has read the room. Chris Williams directs a seventeenth-century maritime yarn in which grizzled hunters chase enormous creatures across the water, and a stowaway orphan named Maisie insists the creatures might not deserve it. The animation is handsome, the sea shanties are committed, and the voice work is sturdy. It is also, quietly, a film with opinions, and it shares them with the patience of a docent.

The architecture of the moral is plain enough. The Crown and its Three Bridges Society fund the hunt, then discover the hunt has become obsolete, then scheme to keep the machinery running because power and profit depend on a monster to fear. When Maisie learns the official history of the beasts is a fabrication, the film tips its hand. The establishment lies, the creatures are gentle, and the crowd at the docks has been cheering for the wrong thing the whole time. There is an eat-the-rich current running beneath the swashbuckling, and a conservationist one too, though the film frames the beasts as wildlife to be protected, not as a climate parable.

What softens the sermonizing is the character work. Maisie is headstrong and drives the plot. Sarah Sharpe, the first mate, is competent and eventually converted. That the two most consequential voices belong to a young Black British actress and Marianne Jean-Baptiste is a casting choice the film never announces, which is to its credit. Race itself goes unmentioned, and the story has no interest in it. The result is a well-made family picture that believes in tolerance, distrusts authority, and never quite stops explaining itself. Charming, earnest, and about forty percent lecture.