Finding Nemo: Film Review

"Finding Nemo" has all of the usual pleasures of the Pixar animation style--the

comedy and wackiness of "Toy Story" or "Monsters Inc." or "A Bug's Life." And it adds

an unexpected beauty, a use of color and form that makes it one of those rare movies

where I wanted to sit in the front row and let the images in front of my eyes create a

good vision. The movie’s setting’s are almost entirely under the sea, in the world of

colorful tropical fish. The use of color, form and movement make the film a delight even

apart from its story.

There is a story, though, one of those Pixar inventions that involves kids on the action

level while adults are amused because of the satire and human (or fishy) comedy. The

movie involves the adventures of little Nemo, a clown fish born with an undersized fin

and an oversized curiosity. His father, Marlin, worries obsessively over him, because

Nemo is all he has left: Nemo's mother and all of her other eggs were lost to

barracudas. When Nemo goes off on his first day of school, Marlin warns him to stay

with the class and avoid the dangers of the drop-off to deep water, but Nemo is so

stubborn, and ends up as a captive in the salt-water aquarium of a dentist in Sydney.

Marlin swims off bravely to find his missing boy, aided by Dory, a blue tang with

enormous eyes who he meets along the way.

The picture's great inspiration is to leave the sea by transporting Nemo to that big

tank in the dentist's office. In it we meet other captives, including the Moorish Idol fish

Gill (voice by Willem Dafoe), who are planning an escape. Now it might seem to us that

there is no possible way a fish can escape from an aquarium in an office and get out of
the window and across the highway and into the sea, but there is no accounting for the

ingenuity of these creatures, especially since they have help from a conspirator on the

outside--a pelican with the voice of Geoffrey Rush.

The first scenes in "Finding Nemo" are a little unsettling, as I realize the movie is

going to be about fish, not people (or people-based characters like toys and monsters).

But of course animation has long since learned to enlist all other species in the human

race, and to care about fish quickly becomes as easy as caring about mice or ducks or

Bambi.

When I review a movie "Finding Nemo,” I can say that "Finding Nemo" is a

pleasure for grown-ups. There are jokes I get that the kids don't, and the complexity of

Albert Brooks' neuroses, and that enormous canvas filled with creatures that have some

of the same hypnotic beauty as--well, fish in an aquarium. They may appreciate another

novelty: This time the dad is the hero of the story, although in most animation it is

almost always the mother.