A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures

***A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures*** is a 2010 animated adventure romantic coming-of-age comedy-drama film. It serves as the first prequel film to the *Sammy & Co* TV series.

## Synopsis

*For an episode list, see Episode guide.*

> *Dive into adventure and fun with Sammy the sea turtle as he swims the oceans of the world searching for the love of his life, Shelly. With his best pal, Ray, Sammy experiences the extraordinary and faces daunting challenges, including hungry sharks and pesky birds. A Turtle’s Tale: Sammy’s Adventures features a rollicking soundtrack and incredible voice talents, including Melanie Griffith, Kathy Griffin, Tim Curry, Anthony Anderson and Stacy Keach. Based on the actual course of a sea turtle’s life, this story of one creature’s breathtaking journey is a thrilling voyage the whole family will love!*
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## Plot

The film opens in 2009 where Sammy and Ray are at a beach in Baja California to get ready for the hatching of their first grandchildren. Sammy tells the viewers about himself being best friends with Ray and that they were born on the very same beach fifty years ago. While he’s waiting for the grandchildren to hatch, Sammy decided to tell the viewers a story about his life and how he made his first encounter with humans.

In 1959 at the same beach, Sammy was at the bottom of the nest and he was the last to hatch. At the time, the beach was completely deserted and it was a recreation place for humans yet. Sammy’s older siblings have already crawled out of the nest to get to the ocean so he had to do the same thing as quickly as possible. However, Sammy was unable to get out of the nest and none of his siblings were around to help him get out, instead, they wished him goodbye and they may or may not see each other again in thirty years. With Sammy all alone in the nest, he cries out for help if there’s still anyone around to get him out but no one was there to help, and Sammy thinks he won't be able to make it when he was only five minutes old.

Suddenly, a seagull appears and captures Sammy since he was unable to get out of the nest in time with the rest of his siblings, and Sammy was carried into the air by the bird. Not wanting to be eaten after being recently born, Sammy manages to defend himself by spitting in the seagull’s eye which causes it to fly out of control and crashes into another seagull who is holding another hatchling in its beak, which leads to the two birds dropping the turtles. While falling from the sky, Sammy notices a female hatchling falling with him and he immediately becomes smitten with her upon seeing her for the first time. The female hatchling greets him and they both manage to dodge an incoming seagull while falling. Eventually, the two manage to land on the ground near the sea, though Sammy ends up landing onto a raft very hard while the female hatchling lands safely in a puddle of water. The female hatchling wants to help Sammy down since he is unable to move because his head is hurt from the landing, but her brother arrives and drags her to the water immediately since there are still seagulls everywhere in the sky. Sammy found out that the female hatchling’s name is revealed to be Shelly by her brother, but he was unable to move and follow her to the ocean, losing her in the process and he is now all alone on the beach.

When night falls, Sammy has a nightmare of Shelly coming back for him but only to get eaten by a seagull. After Sammy wakes up from his slumber, the waves start coming in and push the raft he’s on into the water, carrying it away with him still on it. However, Sammy, who manages to recover from his injuries, doesn’t mind being carried away and decides that this is the first step of the beginning of his journey.

The next morning, Sammy wakes up and walks down the wooden plank of the raft. He looks down in the water and notices a couple of seaweeds sticking on it so he starts eating the seaweeds for breakfast. Suddenly, he notices three older sea turtles on their makeshift raft out of seaweeds are floating next to him. The three older turtles - Jacko, Ollie, and Sandra - greet Sammy and notice how awfully young he is to be all alone in the current. Ollie and Jacko warn Sammy about the danger of the ocean with many predators out to eat him, such as barracudas and sharks. Sandra, who’s annoyed by her friends scaring the young hatchling despite their attempt to warn him, advises Sammy to go with his instincts and he’ll be fine without any reason to be scared before she wishes him good luck on his journey and the three older turtles are being sailed away. Before the three older turtles are out of Sammy’s sight, Ollie and Jacko continue to warn and tease him that he must watch out for nets to prevent himself from being turtle soup as well as telling him to eat seaweed and avoid eating plastic that is floating around the ocean.

After Sammy nearly gets bitten by a piranha when he looks down into the water, he sees a leatherback hatchling being harassed by a bale of loggerhead hatchlings who want him to get off their seaweed raft to prevent him from eating all their food. Feeling upset that he doesn’t fit in with the loggerheads and that they want to get rid of him, the leatherback hatchling gets into the water and he hurts his head when he bumps into Sammy’s raft. The leatherback hatchling gets upset with Sammy for supposedly whacking him upside his head and blames him for giving him a "secret passage" on his head before he dives into the water, leaving Sammy alone again. However, the leatherback hatchling comes out of the water and reveals to him that it is only a joke since leatherbacks got heads like rocks. The two hatchlings introduce each other with the leatherback hatchling introducing himself as Ray. They find out that they were both born on the same beach and on the same day yesterday, which sparks the friendship between the two hatchlings and they start seeing each other as brothers. Ray is welcomed onto Sammy’s raft and together, the newly-formed best friends start traveling south of the Pacific Ocean together.

Around ten years or so later, Sammy and Ray have almost grown up and they start talking about having to look for a mate in the near future. After being persuaded by Ray to tell him what’s his type, Sammy reveals to his best friend how he met Shelly once that he thought could be his type and how he accidentally rescued her from the seagull when they were only a few minutes old. Ray is very impressed by Sammy's story and cheers him up that maybe someday the two best friends will run into Shelly so Sammy will meet her again since it’s a small ocean for them.

When Sammy and Ray are at the Tasman Sea at night, they are unaware that a large ship is being parked a few miles away from their raft. When morning arrives, Sammy once again dreams about Shelly before Ray wakes him up to show him something he saw while exploring the sea. Sammy follows Ray into the water and he meets an octopus named Slim. The two best friends start to have fun with Slim by hanging onto his tentacles and the octopus spins around like a carousel. But their fun ends abruptly when the sea creatures notice that the ship from earlier had dumped oil into the ocean and it contaminates their surroundings. Sammy and Ray are surprised to see oil for the first time and after they say goodbye to Slim to continue their journey, they look up above the surface and see an oil tanker getting shipwrecked which causes a large supply of oil being spilled into the ocean. This was their first encounter with the humans, though it wouldn't be their last. While they left the Tasman Sea, Sammy and Ray learned many things would change during their journey and one thing was that humans would always affect their lives more and more.

After more time has passed, their raft broke and Sammy and Ray now have to travel in the water without a raft to protect themselves from predators. However, only a few seconds after their raft collapsed, Sammy was accidentally captured by a large fishing net and when Ray tried to rescue him, he got captured by a different net as well. The two best friends got separated when the net they got caught in had risen up and Ray got carried away from Sammy from a different ship. Sammy manages to free himself from the net and tries to get off the ship without any of the fishermen seeing him. However, a fisherman unknowingly gets Sammy stuck in-between a crate and the wall of the boat while Sammy tries to make his escape. Some hours later, Sammy starts to feel exhausted from being on the boat for so long and a fisherman finally finds him. Rather than making him into turtle soup, the fisherman throws Sammy back into the water, but Sammy had been away from the water for a long time that he sank down to the ocean floor without being able to move. A dolphin arrives and manages to revive him back to life. Sammy, still feeling exhausted, swims up and sees a beach nearby so he reaches to the shore and falls asleep. But unbeknownst to him, a group of hippies found him at night and places him in an enclosure at the beach.

The next morning, Sammy wakes up and finds himself in the enclosure, taken in. A hippie named Snow noticed how scared Sammy is, so she leaves to get him some food and she tells him that they’ll take real good care of him. Once the hippies leave, Sammy finds company by their pet cat Fluffy who tells him that he should leave immediately before they’ll eat him up. Sammy isn’t afraid of the hippies, however, and he finds them very nice after Snow nurses him back to health by feeding him some vegetables. Later in a rainy day, while Sammy listens to Snow when she is reading *Around the World in 80 Days* to her child, he becomes fascinated that the human in the story is able to travel around the world and that there are other oceans in the world than he first thought since he thought his world is only a small ocean.

Sometime later, Snow finds a large female turtle named Vera and brings her into the enclosure, thinking that Sammy and Vera should mate. However, since Sammy still has feelings for Shelly and Vera is way too old for him, the two sea turtles have a platonic relationship instead. On Christmas 1969, everyone, including Fluffy and the turtles, was all celebrating the holiday together on the beach. As a present for him, Snow paints a peace sign on Sammy’s shell and she makes him their little peace ambassador before wishing him a merry Christmas. Sammy was at first confused about why Snow did it since this is his first Christmas, but he starts to like the marking on his shell as both a present and as a symbol of peace for him. Some more time passes, Vera is released back into the sea by the hippies when they thought she and Sammy are unable to mate.

But not long after that, the unauthorized hippies are evicted by the police. Sammy, not knowing what’s going on, got himself left behind when Snow and her hippie friends all drive away from the beach and they only bring Fluffy with them. Snow wishes Sammy a good life while she is being driven away by one of her friends, which leads to Sammy later realizing that Fluffy is actually trying to get rid of him out of jealousy when Snow and her friends all kindly take good care of him, so Fluffy has lied to him that the hippies are going to eat him after they rescued him in attempt to scared him off. With Sammy all alone without anyone taking care of him and thinking they would come back, he tries to live a life alone on the island. He tries to eat leaves from a tree, chews on a couple of dollar bills when he thought it was leaves, and read the *Around the World in 80 Days* book.

Eventually, Sammy decides to return back to the ocean and he encounters Vera again. On a search for food, Sammy and Vera both run into a female turtle who’s been chased by a shark. Sammy and Vera managed to both rescue the female turtle, who turns out to be a grown-up Shelly. Vera leaves Sammy and Shelly alone and the reunited pair start traveling together to search for food to eat. While traveling, Sammy asks Shelly if she ever gets bored just drifting, going around in circles, and asks if it would be great to travel around the world. He also reveals to her that there's a lot more than these waters than they first thought and he wants to see the ice oceans and strange islands he heard from the humans and he wants to see them. He even mentioned something about a "secret passage" and asks Shelly if she wants to come along with him, which she agrees since she really likes him and wants to travel around the world with him.

And so, the journey for both Sammy and Shelly have begun and they meet several sea creatures along the way to search for the "secret passage". They eventually travel all the way to the Panama Canal where they assume the "secret passage" is close. After they bravely protect themselves from a school of piranhas, a bird eagle captured Sammy and took him to its nest where its chicks are about to eat him. Sammy manages to defend himself from the chicks, but only to hear a chainsaw buzzing below him and before the tree falls down, Sammy notices a ship nearby heading toward a place in the distance so after he safely back into the water, Sammy and Shelly follow the ship and they made it to what they assume is the "secret passage". When the pair is about to get through it, they unintentionally get themselves separated as they try to pass the lock.

Sammy, thinking it is his fault he lost Shelly, feels depressed and heads back to the ocean where he swims past a bale full of happy sea turtle couples. While swimming past the couples, he met an elderly turtle couple who happened to encounter Shelly which makes Sammy feel with relief that Shelly is still alive and she is heading south to the ice oceans to search for the "secret passage". Sammy follows the trail in the hope he’ll see Shelly again and along the way, he encounters a ship where the passengers are tossing down various junks into the ocean. However, Sammy is too close to the ship that two passengers toss down a refrigerator which causes Sammy to climb onto it and use it as a boat.

Sammy travels all the way to Antarctica where he encounters a whale and he asks her for some help. However, the whale accidentally draws attention to a ship full of whalers with one of them fires a harpoon at her, only for the whale to dodge and the harpoon hits the refrigerator Sammy is on instead. Sammy, who is freezing in the water, ends up drawing the attention of a group of Greenpeace workers who found him and picked him up to their ship.

Sammy, who is recovering from frostbite, is being taken by the worker to a lab and he is now placed inside a container in a room of the ship. While on his way to the room, he encounters Shelly inside a cage who’s also trying to recover from frostbite. Once the ship makes it to Monterey, California, Sammy is transported to the Monterey Animal Rescue Center and he is placed inside a pen. There, he reunites with Fluffy who apologizes to him for lying to him and he defends himself that he was jealous at that time. He also tells Sammy that Snow and the hippies he knew from the beach are now working for the rescue center. Sammy looks at the window and sees that a few workers are about to release Shelly back into the ocean which causes Sammy to panic and wants to get out of the pen to see her right away. But before Fluffy can open the pen door to get Sammy out, Snow arrives in the room and she was surprised to see Sammy again after all these years and that Sammy has grown up the last time they saw each other. She tells him that she’ll have to tag him first before he’ll be released back into the ocean.

Soon after Sammy was released back into the ocean with a tag, he continued his search for Shelly. But along the way, he encounters two female leatherbacks who ask for their help to rescue a trapped turtle in a refrigerated trailer. Upon reaching the trailer, Sammy found out that the trapped turtle is none other than his old friend Ray and he comes to his best friend’s rescue. After reuniting with Ray, his best friend took Sammy to a shipwreck to search for Shelly. There, Sammy also met Ray’s mate Rita who tells Sammy that Shelly is inside the shipwreck.

Sammy enters the shipwreck and starts exploring inside it before he spots Shelly eating seaweeds outside behind the ship. However, he sees what appears to be Shelly’s mate arrives and flirts with her which causes Sammy to feel heartbroken. Sammy told Ray and Rita what happened and Ray tries to cheer Sammy up by telling him that there are other female turtles around that he would love. But Rita reveals to Sammy that the turtle who flirts with Shelly is named Robbie and he already has a mate named Clara but he chooses to continue flirting with other female turtles. Sammy was relieved that Robbie and Shelly are not mates so that means he could step in and be with Shelly again, but he became worried that she won’t love him again after what happened at the Panama Canal. Ray, wanting to help Sammy win Shelly’s heart, tells him his plan about a grand entrance to get Sammy and Shelly to reunite again with help from someone named Albert.

When Shelly is eating some seaweeds behind the shipwreck, a shark arrives and chases after her. Sammy arrives and "rescues" Shelly from the shark which reunited the two as a pair. Sammy also revealed to Shelly that the shark is Albert who is actually a toothless shark friend to help Sammy stage the rescue, but Shelly doesn’t mind being part of a fake rescue and she gets together with Sammy again even after the incident at the Panama Canal. And because the love between Sammy and Shelly is so strong for each other, the two get married at the shipwreck with the other sea turtles attending their wedding. The newly-wedded couple both swim away together after the ceremony so they could continue their journey around the world.

Now in present-day 2009, Sammy and Ray, now both a new grandfather to their respective grandkids, both watch Sammy’s newborn grandchildren get across the street from their nest so they could get to the water. Sammy and Ray are planning to meet their respective wives at the Tristan da Cunha once they get all the children in the water. Just then, Sammy heard a sound of his youngest grandson crying for help in the nest so he crawls to the nest and sees him struggling to get out. Sammy, knowing exactly how his grandson feels about being the last to hatch out of the nest and having trouble getting out, helps him out and watches him follow his siblings to the water after urging him to have his own journey.

As the credits roll, it shows a pop-up book called *Around the World in 50 Years* which tells the story about the life of Sammy. The pop-up book first shows Sammy meeting his eldest grandchildren after they were hatched before it starts showing pop-up versions of several scenes from the film. The pop-up book also revealed what happened after Sammy and Shelly got married and they spent their honeymoon traveling into various locations around the world including Venice, San Francisco, Paris, Giza, Easter Island, Niagara Falls, Las Vegas, China, Brussels, and Sydney. At the end of the credits, the "production babies" section shows a 2D depiction of Sammy, Shelly, and their eight children. The eight children represent the eight babies born during the production of the film and they’re following their parents.

## Characters

*To view a complete list of everyone who has worked on* A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures *related material, see A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures/Credits.*
### Major Characters

* Sammy
* Ray
* Shelly

### Minor Characters

* Jacko, Ollie, and Sandra
* Slim
* Snow
* Snow's hippie community
* Fluffy
* Vera
* Rita
* Robbie
* Albert
* Ben
* Sammy's siblings
* Shelly's siblings
* Ella's cousins
* Ricky's cousins (mentioned)
* Clara (mentioned)
* Sammy's children (eight are pictured in "production babies" section)
* Seagulls
* Bird eagle
* Penguins
* Seals
* Sea creatures
* Humans

## Songs

* Free
* Happy People
* Love Today
* Count on Me
* California Dreamin'
* Love Will Find a Way
* Ain't No Sunshine
* You're Not Alone
* Talking to the Moon
* Love Child
* Shark in the Water

## International releases

*A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures* was first released in Belgium and the Netherlands on August 4, 2010. The first country to release an English dub is in Canada during the Toronto International Film Festival in September 11, 2010, before it made its official release on January 1, 2011.

To view a full worldwide list, see *A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures/International Releases*.
## Trivia

* The film's working title was *Around the World in 50 Years*. The working title appears in the end credits on the title of a pop-up book.
* The film has two different English dubs; an American English dub and a British English dub.
* Greenpeace, one of the sponsors of this movie, had their rescue ship featured when they protested at the whalers in Antarctica.
* There are many parallels between this film and its sequel film and/or spin-off TV series *Sammy & Co*:
	+ Just like with Ricky and Ella who're both best friends and born on the same beach on the same day, Sammy and Ray were also born on the same beach on the same day. Also, Ricky and Sammy are both the youngest of their siblings since they happened to be the last to get hatched.
	+ After Sammy was hatched, he had trouble getting out of his nest. Later when one of his grandsons had trouble getting out near the end of the film, Sammy decided to help him out. In the sequel film, Sammy would do the same thing with his granddaughter Ella to help her get out. Also, both Sammy and his grandson happened to say the exact same thing when they're the only one in the nest which is, "Hello? Hello? Is anybody up there?".
	+ Sammy was captured by a seagull five minutes after he was hatched. In the sequel film, Ella experienced the same thing as her grandfather, but this time Sammy arrived to stop the seagull from eating her.
	+ When Sammy was a few minutes old, he managed to free himself from the seagull that captured him by spitting sand in his eyes. His granddaughter Ella does a similar thing when she gets captured by Ringo in "Flying Turtles" by slapping his eyes with her flippers. Both cases lead to them falling down from the sky after their captor drops them, but the difference is that Ella landed safely on the ground just like her grandmother Shelly.
	+ When Sammy and Shelly both fall down from the sky by the seagulls when they're hatchlings, Shelly commented how being carried by the seagulls is like they're flying. In several episodes of *Sammy & Co*, such as "Flying Turtles", their granddaughter Ella would experience a similar thing when she and Ricky are both riding on John.
	+ Before Ray meets Sammy, a bale of loggerhead hatchlings wants to get rid of Ray when he's about to eat their seaweed raft. In the episode "The Rival", Ray's grandson Ricky forms a rivalry with Roby who's a loggerhead.
	+ When Sammy and Ray are relaxing together at a sauna bubble bath, the bath they took is parallel to the bubble bath clam in the reef village in *Sammy & Co*.
	+ Sammy and Ray met Slim during the adventures at the Tasman Sea and they rode on his tentacles like a carousel. Ricky and Ella did the same thing with Margaret along with Annabel and Pipo.
	+ Sammy and Ray were both accidentally captured by fishermen during their travel near Wake Island. Though the two would deliberately get captured by poachers in the sequel film, they would later get accidentally captured again by another group of fishermen in "Grandmas to the Rescue".
	+ Robbie is the name of the green sea turtle who flirts with Sammy's love interest, Shelly. In *Sammy & Co*, there's a loggerhead turtle named Roby who also happened to flirt with Ricky's crush and Sammy's granddaughter Ella.
* Ollie once mentioned to Sammy that there're barracudas in the water that's out to get him, though none of them appear in this film. In the sequel film, Ella and Ricky would get chased by two barracudas and the spin-off series would feature the fish species as recurring antagonists.
* Because the film takes place in Sammy’s perspective, it's unknown how Rita and Ray met. According to Ray in "Love Makes You Blind", he met Rita when he rescued her from a fishing net, but it’s unknown if what he said is an exaggeration.
* According to Sammy in "In Places for the Eclipse!", he and Shelly have experienced a solar eclipse before in their life. However, it’s unknown if he refers to when they have their honeymoon.
* When Sammy looks down from his raft for the first time, he nearly gets bitten by a piranha. He would later fight against a school of piranha to protect Shelly at the Panama Canal.
* There're several sea creatures in the film that foreshadow the underwater species that would appear in the sequel film and spin-off TV series. For instance, Sammy and Ray both swim past a herd of seahorses, which happened to be Big Boss's species
* In "Fortune and Fib Telling", Sammy mentioned to Ricky, Ella, Pipo, and Annabel that he and Ray have traveled to the Bermuda Triangle together during the events of the film.

## References

1. ↑ https://www.boxofficemojo.com/releasegroup/gr1061573125/
2. ↑ https://play.google.com/store/movies/details/A\_Turtle\_s\_Tale\_Sammy\_s\_Adventures?id=ngB\_QbxFJCU&hl=en\_US
3. ↑ https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/a-turtles-tale-sammys-adventures/id874171945
4. ↑ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1230204/releaseinfo?ref\_=tt\_dt\_dt
5. ↑ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1230204/trivia?ref\_=tt\_trv\_trv

## External sites

* A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures on IMDb
* A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures at Rotten Tomatoes