Don't let this cover fool you- it's anything but.
Padak: Swimming to Sea, also known as Pa-dak Pa-Dak, is an All-CGI Cartoon feature directed and written by Lee Dae-Hee. A mackerel born at sea tries to escape from enclosure in a sushi restaurant, all while dealing with manipulation, starvation and despair from the other fish in its tank.
The animated film was made and released by E-DEHI in South Korea in July 25, 2012, and eigoMANGA, who was well known for publishing various manga and games, including Vanguard Princess, obtained the publishing rights for foreign releases and was later released to the west through the Steam storefront on June 6, 2016.
Compare it to Watership Down and The Plague Dogs for animated films with similar themes.
Previews: Trailer
Tropes:
- Affably Evil: Anago is very pleasant towards Padak compared to his fellow fish who are all too happy to beat her up or take bites out of her tail, even though almost every interaction he has with her has threatening undertones and he seems to have a bad case of No Sense of Personal Space... taken further when he immediately begins eating Spotty's corpse, to his tank-mates' horror.
- American Kirby Is Hardcore: The original Korean posters are misleading, but these two english◊ posters◊ try to stay accurate to the true tone of the movie.
- Anyone Can Die: Padak, Spotty, and implicitly everyone else besides the Master.
- Beat Still, My Heart: How the fish are Eaten Alive: Ikizukuri involves butchering the fish while having the heart remain intact with them. Padak learns this the hard way.
- Big Bad: While the Master presents the direct threat for most of the film, Seok Jooh (the owner of the restaurant) is the real villain (for a given definition) of the story.
- Bittersweet Ending: More bitter than sweet. Several of the fish die, Padak included, with the remaining presumed to meet the same fate. The one bright side is the Master learns from his mistakes and Padak's efforts and actually escapes to freedom in the ocean.
- Carnivore Confusion: Averted. Even though the fish can talk, they have no problem eating each other.
- Chekhov's Gun: The miniature sword which wounds Padak for attempting to devour the clownfish becomes more important later on, as in the end, the Master uses it to escape from Seok Joo's hands and escape into the ocean.
- Covers Always Lie: The poster of the movie◊ makes you think that Padak is going to escape. She doesn't.
- Another example is this poster◊ of Padak herself and the clownfish in the ocean looking like she escaped and starts befriending a clownfish, Padak STILL doesn’t escape and instead eats the clownfish but one of them survives.
- The aforementioned posters show Padak with enjoyed expressions even though she rarely does in the actual film.
- Another example is this poster
- Cruel and Unusual Death: This is a film focused on fish living in tanks adjacent to a sushi restaurant, this trope is abundant...
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Padak fights the Master early on. She spends the rest of the film running from him rather than trying to fight him because of it.
- Disney Acid Sequence: All the musical numbers switch to a hand-drawn animation style as opposed to the rest of the movie's CGI, and they mostly consist of abstract and psychedelic imagery, giving them a dreamlike feel.
- Downer Beginning: The movie starts with a lone mackerel (later named Padak) being recently caught from the sea and then sold along with other fish to a sushi restaurant.
- Dropped a Bridge on Him: Padak, who was supposed to be the main protagonist, suffers a Undignified Death without much warning or fanfare.
- Eaten Alive: This ends up being the fate of many fish, as they are shown being sliced into many bite-sized parts while still remaining alive and then served to humans. This is Padak's ultimate fate, too.
- Eye Scream: Several eyes are eaten by the fish in the tank, in gruesome detail.
- Furry Reminder: A very dark take. While the fish are sentient and the humans are portrayed as unfeeling monsters to the fish, the film makes it very clear that the fish are still animals, meaning they display behavior typical of predators in the real world, but monstrous by the standards of sapient beings. Even Padak, one of the kindest fishes, ruthlessly devours the clownfish in the tank she was put in.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: The humans are just Koreans going about their daily lives at the fish market and all of the fish have their moments of savagery.
- Gutted Like a Fish: Literally, given that the movie is about trying to escape from being served in a Sushi Restaurant.
- Humans Are Cthulhu: Most of the humans that are portrayed here look and act unnatural, according to the fishes' point of view.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: Heavily Zig-zagged. There are humans in this movie who are sadistic beasts who imprison and cruelly serve fish while alive, but most are just regular people living their day-to-day lives. Meanwhile the fish themselves aren't much better, taking glee in killing off more weak members if they aren't served and fed to them instead.
- Kick the Dog: The restaurant patron that eats Padak puts a cigarette in her mouth, which adds to her Undignified Death, for no other reason than how funny it looked to him. While the film doesn't demonize humans, this scene highlights how detached they are from suffering of fish in the seafood industry, either out of obliviousness or indifference.
- Kill the Cutie: All the fish in the tank are rather cutely designed and wouldn't look out of place in a children's cartoon. And yet none of the fish are saved except for The Master. Most jarringly Spotty, the friendliest fish in the tank, and Padak, the hero of the story, get killed and devoured by the end.
- Let's Meet the Meat: The story is about a bunch of fish living in a restaurant aquarium, just waiting for their fate of being served as food. Padak is a newcomer who tries to rally the fish into escaping. All of this is played for drama and horror.
- The Lost Lenore: The Master makes his riddles of the ocean determining who gets a bite taken out of their tail based off the stories of his dead partner, who was from the ocean.
- Master Race: There is a distinct social difference in the tank between farm fish and ocean fish.
- Mature Animal Story: Again, this film is not for kids.
- Nature Is Not Nice: A rare example where this trope is applied to the anthropomorphized personalities of the characters. Despite being fully sentient animals who want to live, by the end of the day, fish are still driven by animal instinct; most of the main cast will nip at each other's fins and even gleefully devour their own dying brethren, all without the slightest shred of guilt. And the first thing Padak does after waking up in an aquarium inhabited by cute clownfish? Proceed to eat nearly every single one of the terrified clownfish in the aquarium like popcorn, despite being the only fish to object to her tank mates' savagery prior, simply because her hunger due to days of starvation and being dazed means that her natural instincts override all else.
- No Party Like a Donner Party: The fish survive by eating their brethren, who are either dead or dying. Sometimes they don't bother waiting.
- Only Friend: Spotty for Padak. After he dies, the Master becomes this to her.
- Shown Their Work: All of the fish are surprisingly accurately depicted in both appearance and behavior (necessary anthropomorphism aside). Likewise the preparation methods of the restaurant are decidedly accurate to how they occur in real life, mainly due to Lee having worked at fish restaurants in the past.
- Slasher Smile: The fish in the Tank (Sans the Master) flash a lot of these.
- Spiritual Antithesis: The film can be seen as one towards Finding Nemo, as both of them contrast in tone and narrative themes: While Finding Nemo starts out in the ocean, Padak starts out in a Korean fish market. While the ocean is seen as a mysterious place of adventure in Finding Nemo, in Padak, the horrors of the aquarium-based aspects of it are more displayed in view. And even when both share similarities, the main difference is that Nemo gets all the fish in Dr. P. Sherman's tank to escape via uniting them together, in Padak the hierarchy of the animal kingdom is in full display, and neither of them unite at the end. Only one manages to escape, and it isn't the titular character, who gets sliced up into sushi; it's the Master who is ultimately convinced to leave the aquarium after seeing Padak's fate.
- Take That!: The scene where Padak eats a bunch of baby clownfish alive is probably a riff on the far more idealistic fish movie Finding Nemo.
- Tragic Villain: The Master. Though the "villain" part is a bit of a stretch.
- Trailers Always Spoil: The trailer for Padak shows Padak being turned into sushi, though it's presented as a scenario she's trying to escape rather than the outcome.
- Too Dumb to Live: A clownfish has the bright idea to wake up a hungry fish bigger than them, and tell them to get out of their tank.
- Truth in Television: Why yes, there does exist a type of sushi that has the fish prepared alive, and it's also as controversial as you expect.
- Uncanny Valley: The humans have this effect. They look very realistic compared to the more cartoony fish designs. May be intentional as to show how fish would view the humans killing and eating them.
- Villainous Breakdown: When the Master gets a clear view of what actually goes down in the Sushi Restaurant, he gets a full-blown Heel–Face Turn after spending the whole movie opposed to Padak's plans.
