In Tank Talk, hell is other fish.
The five-episode adult cartoon, created by Mike Salva and co-written with Sean Parrott, begins with the arrival of Lash, the shy new kid in an aquarium of chatty, colorful freshwater fish living in fish-store purgatory. When not pondering the weirdness of humans (there’s a funny riff on The Little Mermaid in the pilot), they habitually ingest (and discharge) each other, copulating and multiplying to pass the time between visits from “the guy who feeds us” — the only human character, who is heard but not seen.
Voiced by Salva’s pals from the local stand-up scene, the cast includes Rik Roberts and Allison Summers as the two-headed, Southern-accented Blub and Glug, who are either cousins or father and daughter. Mark Anundson plays the Eeyore-esque Juju, whose transparent insides house Parrott’s mischievous Flex (“I’ve got a slow metabolism,” says Juju ruefully), while Summers’s tiny but deadly Pixy, in a possible nod to South Park’s Kenny, speaks in unintelligible chirps that only the other fish can understand.
There’s traces of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s influence in Tank Talk’s mixture of crude animation and crude humor, while its adults-in-high-school dynamic recalls HBO’s Vice Principals. But my favorite episode, “Rescue,” the only one that takes the characters outside the tank, evoked something more wholesome: The Magic School Bus. When a slumbering Lash (voiced by Michael Hampton) is mistakenly presumed dead, the gang plays possum to save him from being flushed — and turn the tables on their fish-store overlords. Tank Talk also features the obligatory accidental-drug-trip episode, which I won’t spoil. There’s probably a metaphor for quarantine somewhere in there too.
Salva, Parrott & Co. wrote and recorded dialogue for the series in 2019, and Salva animated and edited from home during lockdown, wrapping in July. “Since all of the characters were made from polymer clay, I had to bake [them] in my oven before scanning them into the computer,” he tells the Scene in an email.
Of the inspiration behind Tank Talk, Salva says, “I think I just have an easier time making animals seem like humans than [I do] making humans seem like humans. Besides, if I animate characters in a confined area, I don't have to draw as many backgrounds. So the fish tank idea just clicked.”
Watch the Tank Talk pilot here, and find all of the episodes on Vimeo.
Tank Talk 1 - INTRO from Project Meatball on Vimeo.
