Maybe it's only me but I find it annoying i can't see behind the guy + how the islands suddenly disapear. They seem to suddendly dissolve into thin air and not 'sink' like the animation seems to show. According to my logic, if it was sinking, we should still able to stand for a fraction of a sec after it's underwater.
Also the animations of island floating up and sinking down are the same on some levels, so we can't always know which way its going when in a hurry.