Cape fur seal Quinn loses his best friend, Benji, to a great white shark attack. He meets up with Claggart, and together they assemble a team to keep the ruthless sharks from Seal Island.
Seal Team contains examples of:
- Acrofatic: Beth is the fastest swimmer out of the protagonists.
- Action Girl: Former aquarium performer and "harbor queen" Jing doesn't formal military training and she still manages to keep up with the rest of the party.
- Always Chaotic Evil: With exception to one Token Heroic Orc of a different species, every Great White Shark is a bloodthirsty (if sometimes inefficient) predator who wants only to devour seals, regardless of what better options there may be.
- Artistic License – Biology: Given the sheer amount of research put into aquatic life this seems to be intentional artistic license:
- Drowning doesn't seem to be a concern to any of the seals present, which talk at length underwater without surfacing for hours at a time.
- Cape gannets here are portrayed with thinner, more seagull-like feet than they actually have.
- All the Great white sharks in the movie have quite overweight bodies and flat snouts.
- Battle Couple: (The Great) Geraldo and (The Magnificent) Jing eventually patch up their strained relationship and become this.
- Conservation of Ninjutsu: Averted. While the team gets better at battling sharks with weapons and tactics, when they don't have a way to entrap or ambush them, even a single one can give the group trouble. They put up a valiant fight during the climax, but the massive shiver that Grimes assembles just keeps powering through all the obstacles they present. It takes Claggart and Dolph charging into the scene with the H.M.F.F. Good Boy to turn the tide.
- Cowardly Lion: Geraldo is a vain, lying braggart, but he's the only other seal on the island (and he's not even originally from it) to answer Quinn's call, and he endures Claggart's intense training with him and Beth to ultimately live up to his big talk.
- Disney Villain Death: Grimes is killed by the massive battleship propeller of the H.M.F.F Good Boy.
- Does Not Like Spam: If someone's eating barnacles, it's to conserve food they actually like or if they have no other choice.
- Eiffel Tower Effect: An unusual food-based example. During the scene where the seals "borrow" a boat from the Cape Town docks, the human they borrow it from is enjoying a Gatsby sandwich
. - Fake Ultimate Hero: No one takes Geraldo's frequent boasts of how he escaped his life as a performing seal from an aquarium seriously, but the truth of it is even more embarrassing than anyone imagined as he didn't even try or think to escape. That was his partner Jing's idea. He only got free because the aquarium tossed him out due to no longer being able to do their act by himself.
- Fun with Acronyms: H.M.F.F. (Hydro Marine Military Force), Claggart's now defunct military outfit. It's pronounced "hmff", which is why he makes that sound so much.
- The Ghost: Señor Echo, Switch's roommate (who sounds like him), never shows up onscreen.
- Hand Cannon: The Pistol Shrimp. Quinn firing it for the first time to save Beth almost knocks him out with the recoil from the blast alone.
- Motivational Lie: Brick, the leader of the community, knows that sharks go after the pod during sardine runs, but denies such because if they don't fish, they'll all starve.
- No Indoor Voice: Dave, the basking shark (voiced by Matthew Mercer). Hey, if your species has a Volumetric Mouth you might as well use it.
- Retired Badass: A grizzled Claggart is reintroduced in the movie slumming it in Grimes' hideout for a snack, shortly before he saves Quinn by smartly outmaneuvering the shark so that he knocks himself out on the walls of the ship they're fighting in. He then drags Quinn to safety without the use of one of his flippers due to needing it to hold him.
- Sacrificial Lamb: Benji.
- Shout-Out:
- Dave says he only eats plankton. And one time, a little wooden boy by mistake.
- A number of the sharks who answered Grimes' call are sharks from the James Bond film Thunderball, Jaws, and Sharknado films among others.
- When Claggart is teaching the team flipper signals and they mess it up, Geraldo's signals are "Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down".
- Stop Motion: Though the film is animated by CGI, the visual style was heavily influenced by stop-motion films, including a low frame rate.
- Super-Persistent Predator: Instead of going after an easier meal, the sharks become determined to prove something to the seals by taking them down.
- Super-Powered Shrimp: Switch uses a pistol shrimp as an actual gun to threaten people with.
- Sweet Seal: The main cast are mostly seals and they're 80's Action Heroes.
- Threatening Shark: Great white sharks are the film's main antagonists, playing Carnivores Are Mean to the maximum specially with Grimes. Curiously, the movie plays with it by also introducing Dave the basking shark, which true to life is harmless but very much despised by everyone, and the credits semi-address the problems of shark depictions in media before devolving into a joke about Dave eating car tires.
