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Poster (c) Buena Vista
The line between fantasy and reality is becoming rapidly blurred. It seems that all computer-animated movies are doing extremely well, while the hand-drawn ones seem to be either direct-to-video sequels nobody wanted, box office bombs, or have horrendous ideas. Finding Nemo may soon be the highest grossing animated movie ever, simply because it’s easy to look at. It’s not as good as Pixar’s other movies because it lacks the one key ingredient that made Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. work so well. Most kids never feared of being taken away by a man and being put into a fish tank in a dentist’s office. However, I don’t think there’s a child alive who never thought that their toys moved when they weren’t there or that there were monsters in the closet. Because of this, Finding Nemo couldn’t connect as well, because, simply, it wasn’t something that anyone thought of in real life.
The plot has Marlin (Albert Brooks), a clownfish who can never tell good jokes, with his wife Coral (Elizabeth Perkins) (where DO they get these names?), who just moved into a new home. A shark, however, eats Coral and all but one of her eggs. A few years later, Marlin raises Nemo (Alexander Gould) in an overprotective environment. To prove his dad wrong, Nemo swims out into the open ocean and is scooped up by a diver. Marlin goes on a search to find Nemo, and, along the way, meets over-the-top Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), who has short-term memory loss.
Finding Nemo has lavish landscapes. It really looks like the ocean, and, although none of the fish or creatures in the ocean looked real, they were well done. The best animation that Pixar does is with real things (like in the opening short, Knick Knack). Although they have some work to do with humans to make them look realistic, a few scenes, set in a doctor’s office, looked incredibly real. Maybe if Pixar and PDI (who did Shrek) exchange secrets than Pixar could have better looking humans and PDI could have more realistic surroundings.
The only character that made me constantly laugh in this comedy was Dory. Although most of the target audience would not understand most of it, her short-term memory loss was a genius addition to the script. She was so uninhibited, it was really hilarious. However, Brooks, as Marlin, didn’t really do much for me. If his ability to not be able to tell a joke had been played out more, it would’ve worked more. His paranoid behavior also ebbed and flowed, while if he had another quirk that he could do throughout the movie, would’ve worked more, also. The fun part about animated movies is all of the voices. I couldn’t tell most of them, but I did recognize Willem Dafoe. Others include Allison Janney, Brad Garrett, Erik Per Sullivan, Stephen Root, Vicki Lewis, and Geoffrey Rush.
There’s not a real moral to Finding Nemo. What is there to learn? All I’ve learned is from the opening credits that snowmen desperately want to leave their snowglobes. Basically, Finding Nemo won’t go into the same category as Toy Story or Monsters, Inc.. Instead, it’ll probably go into the “forgotten” category like A Bug’s Life.
Rated G.
Review Date: August 1, 2003