Posted: 05/30/2003

Finding Nemo

(2003)

by Hope Villanueva

Funny, sweet little fish tale from the folks who brought you Toy Story.

John Lasseter’s genius team over at Pixar has done it again! Being a huge fan of previous Pixar films, particularly Toy Story 2, one of the rare sequels that are better than the original, I went into this film with high expectations and I was not disappointed. Director/writer Andrew Stanton has infused Finding Nemo with such love, joy and humor that combined with cinematography that makes the ocean more beautiful than it has ever looked on film, that Pixar has a sure-fire classic.

Finding Nemo opens in the new home of Marlin and Coral, a pair of soon to be clownfish parents, watching over their brood of several hundred eggs. After a horrible incident, Marlin, now terrified of the sea, is left alone to raise his one remaining child, Nemo, a precocious boy who is constantly oppressed by his obsessively worried father. Marlins worries are compacted by the fact the Nemo was born with one fin much smaller than the other. Following a fight between father and son, Nemo storms off, only to be caught by a diver and taken to live in a dentist’s fish tank. Marlin, determined not lose the last member of his family, swims off after him. The rest of the film follows the parallel stories of Marlin’s search for Nemo with the help of the memory deficient blue tang, Dory and Nemo’s integration and then efforts to escape the fish tank.

As with every Pixar movie, the visuals are a true sight to behold. Every scale on Marlin’s skin, each shark’s tooth and bit of whales’ baleen is rendered with excruciating exactitude, yet blends in seamlessly into the reality of the computer generated ocean. Details are their strength as they remember that the fish need to take big gulps of water and the hold their breath before peeking out above the surface and that Nemo has to flip his small fin twice as fast as his big one in order to swim straight. The coral reef is easily on par with real photos of the Great Barrier Reef, as are its inhabitants. A swarm of giant, delicate pink jellyfish is turned into a wafting forest of deadly stingers and the East Australian Current (or the EAC as the more experienced fish refer to it) becomes the uber-freeway for high-speed travel and adrenaline rushes.

But in the end, it’s all about the characters. Marlin (Albert Brooks) is a most loving father and it is completely understandable why he is so protective of Nemo. Nemo, by contrast, wants nothing more than the freedom to grow up and for Marlin to be there for him while he does it. Their anger and frustration with each other at the beginning of the film melts away entirely with their need to be reunited. Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) is a laugh factory with blue scales as she struggles to remember the simplest of tasks. Yet, in a scene late in the film, I nearly cried as she pleaded with Marlin not to leave her alone in the big ocean. The cast from the fish tank where Nemo goes is possibly even more colorful. There is a purple and yellow goby with a OCC problem about germs, a pink starfish (Allison Janney, The West Wing), a pufferfish who inflated when he gets worked up, a yellow tang who has an obsession with the little bubble maker in the tank and a shrimp who is in charge of cleaning and has a French accent. No to mention they all know enough about dentistry to fill cavities on their own. The entire group is presided over by Gill (Willem Dafoe, Spider-man), an exotic looking fish who was also caught in the open ocean. To round out the cast, there is a trio of sharks who are part of an AA-like group, a freeway full of sea turtles with California beach bum accents, a school of tuna who do impersonations, a Brit Pelican fascinated with dentistry (Geoffery Rush) and mindless seagulls who say nothing but the word “Mine!” (who resemble characters in a Wallace and Grommit cartoon. A homage maybe?)

As a bit of bonus fun, there are two great tag-ons to the film. Firstly, there is a short trailer for the next Pixar film, The Invincibles. The clip features an over-aged superhero trying to buckle his utility belt. Trust me, it’s funny. And there is a short film, pulled from the Pixar archives, called Knick Knacks. The short film at the beginning of the feature is becoming a standard for Pixar and a well-loved standard at that. This short follows a collection of little souvenir figures, who groove to the tunes of Bobby McFerrin. A little snowman stuck in a snowglobe tries to find a way out of his glass globe to go talk to a flirty girl-figurine. Good fun all around!

Finding Nemo, as all good animated films, holds itself to the goal of strong storytelling, despite being directed at children. I have thought for a while that Pixar would inherit the mantle of great family entertainment from Disney, which had sadly lost its touch in recent years. Nemo reaffirms that thought. At the end of the day, for all its humor (and this movie is full of it), it is about very simple things. Marlin learns that he needs to support his son, despite that fact that it means letting him go and Nemo learns that he doesn’t have to let his off-sized fin become a crutch for the things he thinks he can’t do. He just has to be more determined and work that much harder. Sounds like good lessons for all of us.

Hope Villanueva is a Los Angeles thespian who is strongly in support of film that says something, as she is trying to make theatre that says something. You can learn more about Hope’s own theatre by clicking here.

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