YMMV / Help! I'm a Fish

• Accidental Innuendo: One song has the lyric "Suddenly I feel so high, I could almost cry".
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Stella's moral is basically how you can't get everything you want. However, she ends up getting what she wants at the end: Which is to be able to keep Sasha. While some view it as a Broken Aesop since she does get what she wants, it can be interpreted more as "You can get a better thing by waiting".
• Awesome Art: This is some gorgeous hand-drawn animation! So gorgeous it's almost always compared to Don Bluth's works in terms of visuals.
• Awesome Music: The Villain Song "Intelligence" has become a fan-favorite. Even fans who didn't like the other songs in the movie tend to like this one.
• Crosses the Line Twice: While Joe's death may be a bit disturbing, the fact that he brought it onto himself by a trick, his sudden gasp when he finally goes, and Fly's expression when it happens makes it a little bit funny, at the least.
• Cult Classic: This film is pretty much unknown among most people. However, it actually has gained a fansite.
• Fan Nickname: "Snapefish" for Joe, due to sharing the same voice actor (Alan Rickman).
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The film found much more success in Germany and France than anywhere else. In Germany in particular, it was #7 in the top ten box office draws.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The professor's memory problems are Played for Laughs in the film. Years later, his voice actor Terry Jones was forced to retire due to an onset of dementia (which eventually claimed his life in 2020), making it significantly less funny nowadays.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Fly and Stella once they meet up as fish, with Stella hugging Fly and crying about how scared she was, him hugging her back and comforting her then cheering her up by playing with her.
  • Most of Stella and Sasha's interactions are this.
• Moe: Stella is adorable in both her human and starfish forms.
• Moral Event Horizon: Joe is revealed to be completely beyond redemption when he leaves the three children to be eaten by piranhas, knowing full well that these characters are transformed humans that need the potion more than he does.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Aaron Paul as Chuck, eight years before he became famous for playing Jesse Pinkman.
  • David Bateson also went on to be best known for his role as Agent 47 in the Hitman series.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Chuck's laptop, the Millennium 2000 PMX (referencing the year this film was made) uses Floppy Disks for backing up data from a system crash. Floppies have relatively low storage by today standards. Today's laptops would instead do the same thing with smaller devices with higher storage such as USB storage & MicroSD Cards.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Despite receiving a U rating (or a G rating in the United States), the film contains some Family-Unfriendly Violence. For example, a shark character eats sapient fish, which is Played for Laughs; a crab injures Fly to the point of blood; and Joe dies by getting a Death by Irony when he drowns after turning into a human. This can be partially chalked up to Values Dissonance, where Danish values for media aimed at children are lower.

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