Finding Nemo

“Finding Nemo,” released in 2003, has every one of the normal joys of the Pixar animation style – the comedy and silliness of “Toy Story” or “Monsters, Inc.” or “A Bug’s Life.” Roger Ebert admitted, “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 wash out to the edges of my field of vision.” The movie takes place almost completely under the sea, in the world of polychromatic humid fish – the flora and fauna of a narrow warm-water shelf not far from Australia. The use of color, form and movement make the film enjoyable even separately from its story.

There is a story, however, one of those Pixar creations that involves kids on the action level while adults are entertained because of the spoof and human (or fishy) comedy. The movie involves the journey of little Nemo, voiced by Alexander Gould, a clown fish born with an undersized fin and a huge curiosity. His father, Marlin, over-worries about Nemo, because Nemo is the only thing he has left: Nemo’s mother, voiced by Elizabeth Perkins, and all of her other eggs were eaten by a barracuda. When Nemo attends his first day of school, Marlin informs him to stay with the class and avoid the dangers of the drop-off to deep water, but Nemo challenges him, and ends up being kidnapped in the fish tank of a dentist, voiced by Bill Hunter, in Sydney. Marlin boldly swims to get back his kidnapped son, helped by Dory, a blue tang with enormous eyes who he befriends on his way to Sydney.

Ebert mentioned, “These characters are voiced by actors whose own personal mannerisms are well known to us; I recognized most of the voices, but even the unidentified ones carried buried associations from movie roles, and so somehow the fish take on qualities of human personalities.” For instance, Marlin is voiced by Albert Brooks as an overprotective, phobic complainer, and Dory is Ellen DeGeneres (hilarious comedian who is the host of her own daytime talk show) as helpful, cheerful and absent-minded (she suffers from short-term memory loss). The Pixar computer animators, the leader being writer-director Andrew Stanton, design an undersea world that is just a dark gloomy, as it should be. We can’t see as far or as suddenly in sea water, and so threats arrive more swiftly, and everything has a faintness of focus. There is something surreal about the visuals of “Finding Nemo,” something that suggests the dream of scuba-diving.

The movie’s best inspiration is to leave the sea by taking Nemo to the fish tank in the dentist’s office. There we meet the other captured fish, including Gill (Willem Dafoe), Bloat (Brad Garrett), Peach (C.J. Cregg on "The West Wing" and currently as Bonnie Plunkett on "Mom," Allison Janney), Gurgle (Austin Pendleton), Bubbles (Stephen Root), Deb (Vicki Lewis) and Jacques (Joe Ranft), who are planning an escape. Now it may look to us that there is no way they can be free from the tank in a dentist office, roll their bags out of the window, down the awning, across the street and into the sea, but there is no doubting the cleverness of these fish, especially since they have friends outside the dentist – a pelican named Nigel, voiced by Geoffrey Rush.

You may think that many pelicans survive by eating fish, not rescuing them, but some of the characters in this movie have evolved excellently into vegetarians. As Marlin and Dory travel to Sydney, for example, they meet three sharks (Barry Humphries, Eric Bana and Bruce Spence) who have created a club where they have an oath to say that “fish are friends, not food.”

The beginning moments of “Finding Nemo” are a little sad, as we find out the movie is going to be about fish, not people (or characters created by people like toys and monsters). However, animation has come a long way where they create every kind of species in the human race, and to care about fish so fast becomes as easy as caring about mice or ducks or Bambi.

Ebert admitted, “When I review a movie like "Finding Nemo," I am aware that most members of its primary audience do not read reviews. Their parents do, and to them and adults who do not have children as an excuse, I can say that "Finding Nemo" is a pleasure for grown-ups.” There are jokes adults understand that their children don’t, and the difficulty of Albert Brooks’ phobias, and that giant tank filled with fish that have some of the same fascinating chars as – well, fish in an aquarium. They might like another originality: This time the dad is the protagonist of the movie, although in many animated movies it is almost always the mother.

As I stated on Tuesday, this movie is the best Pixar movie and my absolute favorite in the Pixar movies. This was the first Pixar movie I saw in the theaters. This is one of my favorite animated movies, another one of my all-time favorite movies, and I had seen this many times in my teen years. That was because I had younger cousins who had seen this movie so many times that I could quote this from beginning to end. They had seen it that many times. However, even though they have grown now and they don’t see this anymore, I still love this movie for the underwater world they created and the characters that live there. If you haven’t seen this movie, don’t read this review and go out and see the movie. You will love it, I assure you.

Check in tomorrow when we look at a family superhero movie, which is also one of the best, in “Disney Pixar Month.”