arlin (Brooks) is just a little orange clown fish living on Australia's Great Barrier Reef with his wife and 400 unhatched eggs. Tragedy strikes in the form of a passing barracuda, leaving Marlin with no wife and just one egg that was missed in the feeding frenzy. He swears that no harm will ever come to his one remaining child.
But his offspring, Nemo (Gould), turns out to be a plucky little fellow who deeply resents his father's neurotic overprotectiveness. Nemo is determined to experience the wonders of the reef, despite a stunted fin and a dad intent on making that handicap (finicap?) a bigger deal than it really is.
Marlin's overprotectiveness becomes so annoying to the little fish that Nemo ultimately cries out, "I hate you!" and defiantly swims out to the strange floating object the other fish call a "butt."
Alas, it's not a "butt," but a boat, owned by a scuba-diving dentist who immediately seizes Nemo and takes him home as a new specimen for his waiting-room aquarium. Nemo finds himself trapped with a number of other captive fish, all of whom are fascinated by dentistry. He is especially taken by the aquarium's leader, Gill (Dafoe), a battle-scarred angelfish obsessed with leading an escape back to the ocean.
Meanwhile, Marlin has embarked upon an equally obsessed search for his son, quickly finding a strange ally in the form of Dory (DeGeneres), a blue tang with a short-term memory problem so severe she needs every situation re-explained to her every few minutes. Their journey leads them to confrontations with angler fish, exploding mines, baleen whales, seagulls and (most disconcertingly) Bruce, a great white shark undergoing a twelve-step program to cure his addiction to smaller fish. Will Marlin and Dory reach that dentist's office in Sydney before Nemo goes belly up?
An adventure that animates the heart
The first thing that strikes you is the quality of the animation. In this, Pixar gets
better with every film, but Finding Nemo presented challenges even for craftsmen of
their caliber. For one thing, most of the viewpoint characters are fish, who needed to be
expressive and visually interesting even without limbs for comic gesticulation. For another,
almost all the action takes place underwater, in an environment with special physics that are usually ignored in animated films taking place there. Pixar's previous fine character work made it easy to predict their success with the fish, but what they accomplish with the ocean environment exceeds all expectations: the underwater characters all look like they're actually underwater. Light refraction, floating silt and the blurring effect of distance are all reproduced with an exacting eye that renders everything in sight amazingly real.
The second thing that strikes you is the beautiful rendering. Finding Nemo is eye candy of the highest order, providing audiences with a series of spectacular vistas as gorgeous as anything that's ever been seen on the animated screen. From the riot of color in the opening scenes, set on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, to a pelican's low-altitude flight over the waters of Sydney Harbor, everything is breathtaking, and everything is persuasively real. The grand images are so accomplished that it's even more startling to focus in on the smaller details—like the subtly different skin textures of the protagonists, Marlin and Dory—and realize that they've been given the same level of attention, the same degree of obsessive thought.
The third thing that strikes you is that none of this really matters in the long run, because the eye-popping quality of the CGI is almost beyond the point. The development of special-effects technology has left us with any number of films where spectacular visuals are forced to compensate for empty characters, hackneyed ideas, stupid plots and lazy storytelling. In a few years, when the special effects look primitive, the stories are cast into harsh relief, and the blockbusters we once gawked at are all too often revealed as the lame, insulting exercises they always were. But in Finding Nemo, the visuals, great as they are, never overwhelm the story: The breakneck pace never overwhelms the emotional elements; the ingeniousness of the technology is
never treated as a substitute for genuine invention on the script level.
Finding Nemo would
have been an impressive piece of work even if the ocean had been just a pale blue background and the animation had been just traditional 2-D cel work of the quality shown on Saturday mornings. The voice talent is first-rate, the jokes are funny, the story has a real emotional core, and the script shows real sophistication in the way it tells a story accessible to kids that nevertheless provides plenty of brain fodder for adults. Film geeks will derive additional pleasure once they remember that "Bruce" was the name of the shark who menaced swimmers in Jaws and recognize an early father-son confrontation as a line-by-line replay of a similar one from Kramer vs. Kramer.
Beyond that point, any review becomes a list of favorite elements: from the seagulls, whose cawing translates to "Mine! Mine! Mine!", to the riffs on Dory's short-term memory problems, to the dentist-office aquarium, whose inhabitants all display intense interest in orthodontic technique. Finding Nemo provides so many treasures, in such nonstop abundance, that any genuine attempt to provide such a list could easily be as long as the film itself.
