Finding Nemo
Directed by Andrew Stanton
Starring Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Alexander Gould, Willem Defoe, Brad Garrett
Rated PG for intense fish chasing scenes and for references to possible sexual intercourse between fish (I made that all up.)

I’m a bit torn. Part of me wants to say that Finding Nemo is perfect. The script is air tight, save an extra ending or two. It hits every emotional and narrative point, delivering a story so smooth that any screen writing teacher would cry over it and decide they were now ready to die. The dialogue is great, highlighted by stellar performances by Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres. The laughs are consistent and you truly care for the characters, who emit real emotions from the film’s beautifully artificial world. The animation is gorgeous, quite possibly representing Pixar’s most impressive technical achievement to date.

So what’s the problem? Well, nothing really. It is kind of perfect. Too perfect? Well I always thought that was a stupid thing to say, but in this case it’s sort of true. The movie’s great, but it all flows a bit too easily. It’s perfect classical Hollywood. It takes a time-tested story template (Recovery, as seen in The Searchers, Star Wars and a lot of other movies) and plays it for drama, action and laughs. It follows through on each and every setup it puts forth and it
has a good time doing it. You can’t help but enjoy the ride. Just the same, you know where its going, if not on a moment to moment level, at least on a more global scale. And while pretty much every cartoon provides the obligatory happy ending, this one gets there in a pretty standard way, something that I’d let slide in most cases.

But this is Pixar. The people who brought us the Toy Story series and, more relevantly for my point, Monsters Inc. While both Nemo and Monsters feature fairly standard over-arching narrative structures, Monsters Inc. is able to make every scene fresh, original and most importantly, unpredictable. The details provided by both the screenwriters and animators allow for constant surprises. The film is fresh and inventive at every turn. Nemo, on the other hand, is solid at
every point, but never quite as ingenious. Part of this results from the film being based in a reality somewhat closer to our own. Whereas Monsters Inc. could make each and every rule for itself (and did so brilliantly), Nemo proves that even a world of talking fish has to follow certain rules. They swim, they’re afraid of fisherman etc. And while the film makers do a great job of creating a full, seemingly organic world, it just doesn’t have the intense originality of Monsters Inc. They make it look like it was all too easy, something that is certainly a credit to their abilities, but that also gives the film a bit of a formulaic feel.

But I’m being nitpicky. And besides, its not really fair to judge one film in relation to another, let alone one as brilliant as Monsters Inc. Judged on its own terms, Finding Nemo is a thoroughly enjoyable, thoroughly successful film that should appeal to just about every demographic. It’s a great lesson in story telling, an astounding technical achievement and the best movie I’ve seen this year. If you haven’t seen it, you certainly should, regardless of your age or taste in movies.

Rating 84%