I’ll Admit It: Lola From Shark Tale Was My First Lesbian Crush
Dreamworks / Photo collage by Them
2004 Was So Gay is Them’s look back at a pivotal year for queer history and pop culture. Read more from the series here.
There are two kinds of queer people: the ones who admit they had huge crushes on non-human cartoon characters growing up and the liars.
An obvious example has probably already come to mind: Maybe you had a thing for the titular fox in Disney’s Robin Hood or perhaps the sight of Bugs Bunny awakened something in you. But 20 years ago, DreamWorks Animation gifted me with one of my most formative fictional crushes. I’m talking, of course, about Angelina Jolie’s dreamy fish character Lola from 2004’s Shark Tale.
Let’s acknowledge this right off the bat: Shark Tale is, quite frankly, an absolutely bizarre cultural artifact to revisit. Will Smith stars as a penniless Anthony Ramos lookalike fish named Oscar, who wiles away his days scrubbing cetaceans’ tongues clean in the “Whale Wash,” fantasizing about the good life. His big break comes after falsely taking credit for killing shark mob boss Don Lino’s (Robert DeNiro) son, skyrocketing him to fame as the local reef’s “Sharkslayer.” Oscar was already kind of a dirtbag but he only gets worse after becoming an overnight celebrity.
And that’s where Lola comes in. Beautiful and vain, and every bit the archetypal smokeshow, Lola, voiced by a sultry Angelina Jolie, barely deigns to look Oscar’s way until he makes it big. Oscar casts aside his best friend Angie (Renée Zellweger), even though Lola is only interested in his fortune. While promoting the film, Jolie even went so far as to describe her character “a gold digger” who “represents everything that is wrong with women.” Oscar falls for her schtick hook, line, sinker — and reader, so did I.
As I got older, the particulars of Shark Tale’s strange mob antics faded from my mind. One thing that absolutely didn’t fade? That first scene with Lola. By 2024 standards, the CGI animation is jarringly flat, the uncanny smoothness of the textures distracting from the flair of the all-star voice cast. Yet somehow, Lola manages to largely transcend Shark Tale’s mediocre visual trappings from the moment she’s introduced, flouncing onscreen as Ludacris’ “Gold Digger” plays in the background. (No one ever accused this movie of being subtle). She oozes sultriness, from her luscious mane of red-and-orange striped hair that she’s constantly flipping, her form-fitting maxi dress, her impossibly tiny waist, her smoky purple eyeshadow, and, of course, those luscious red lips. She also looks quite a lot like Jolie, which only helps her cause.
Needless to say, seven-year-old me was mesmerized. My only comparable crush at the time was Lori Loughlin as Aunt Becky on Full House, and let’s just say that Lola hasn’t humiliated my inner child by going to prison over a college rowing scandal.
If anecdotes from friends of a similar age are any indication, I’m not alone in my affections: One famously broke her Shark Tale DVD because she rewound it to watch Lola’s entrance so many times and had to lie to her parents about it afterward.
And while Lola is officially labeled as a “gold digger,” if we’re being more precise, she’s actually the DreamWorks version of a classic femme fatale. Shark Tale’s original title was Sharkslayer, with producer Bill Damaschke admitting to Entertainment Weekly that “we set out to make a movie a little more noir, perhaps a little darker than we’ve landed.”
The femme fatale archetype is synonymous with film noir, a subgenre of stylized crime dramas that peaked in the 1940s and 1950s, capitalizing on the cynicism and unease of America following the Great Depression and second World War. After the implementation of the Hays Production Code in the ’30s, noir was one of the only genres to reliably feature morally gray female characters, which is how the femme fatale was born. These often-mysterious, glamorous characters used their sexuality as a means of pursuing their own ends in deeply patriarchal, uncaring worlds.
Due to the censorious pressure of the Hays Code, femme fatales in classic noir movies were typically portrayed as cold, self-serving women who get their comeuppance by the time the credits roll — but both filmmakers and audiences alike understood that these cigarette-smoking dames were supposed to be cool. In more modern iterations, such as David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive or the Wachowski sisters’ 1996 directorial debut Bound, femme fatales have been given the queer spin they deserve. In these movies, femme fatales are reframed as the main characters, subverting the genre with a nuance that wasn’t possible in the heyday of noir.
The Thinker, a fictional gay rapper in a blonde wig, has captured our hearts and minds.
And while it may seem silly to suggest that a DreamWorks fish who’s introduced via a bad gold digger joke deserves a place in that conversation, maybe she does? Just a little bit? For all of Shark Tale’s referential schlock and hackneyed humor — a “vegetarian shark” is this movie’s idea of a punchline — Lola’s magnetic femininity spoke to my undeveloped little queer brain precisely because it was so exaggerated in a high femme way. She has clearly gotten stuck in the sapphic consciousness in a way few other cartoon characters have.
One TikToker put it well in the caption of their viral Lola fancam — because of course, there are fancams — writing, “Tell me why every time they say ‘fish’ in Drag Race, I think about her.”
Shark Tale also marked my first-ever introduction to Jolie herself. I was far too young to have seen her Oscar-winning performance in 1999’s Girl, Interrupted, or her action turns in films like Lara Croft. As an elementary schooler, I had no clue that she would go on to be praised for her humanitarian work, or hailed as a bisexual icon. It is distinctly weird that I had a crush on her in fish form before I ever knew how beautiful she was in real life. Sometimes, I lie awake and wonder whether Angelina Jolie is aware of how many early-aughts queer awakenings she sparked through a critically panned fish mob movie that she probably just did for a paycheck. If she isn’t, she really should be.
So no, I don’t think that Shark Tale deserves the same reclamation that nearly every object of twentysomething nostalgia seems to receive these days. This movie is not some secret masterpiece. But in a world where The Shape of Water literally won Best Picture, I’m more than happy to take any opportunity to remind you that, yes, Lola the fish is still really fucking hot.
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Originally Appeared on them.
2004 Was So Gay
