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Pixar Animation Studios have produced four great computer-animated features
over the past eight years - the two Toy Story films, Monsters
Inc. and A Bug's Life, but the ads for this feature didn't impress.
One should never put too much stock into coming
attraction trailers.
Life along the Great Barrier Reef is full of dangers
when you are a tiny clown fish. And for Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks), a
single parent determined to protect his only son Nemo (Alexander Gould),
there are constant fears and anxieties. On his first day of school, Nemo
defies his father and swims off alone to investigate a boat; a diver
suddenly scoops him up as Marlin helplessly watches.
Marlin turns desperate as he frantically swims off in
search for his son. He soon bumps into Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), a likeable
fish with severe short-term memory loss, who offers to help. The odd couple
set out to, yes, find Nemo, contending with sharks, deadly anglerfishes and
a forest of jellyfish. Meanwhile, in a dentist's office overlooking Sydney
Harbor, Nemo has landed in a fish tank that is home to a colorful group of
characters that want to initiate him into their gang. When word of Marlin
and Dory's ocean adventures gets back to Nemo, he is so thrilled to learn of
his father's search for him that he becomes motivated to move forward with
an escape plan of his own.
Single-minded seagulls that only say "Mine!"
Vegetarian sharks with Australian accents enrolled in a 12-step recovery
program. Neurotic Clown Fish who aren't very funny. These are but a few
things that help make Finding Nemo perfect entertainment for everyone
young and old. Director and co-screenwriter Andrew Stanton, who also
provides the voice of a surfer-dude turtle named Crush, and his team of
professionals do a great job combing a well-conceived concept, a solid
story, rich characters worth caring about and eye-popping animation to make
a through and through winner. Nemo is filled with enough smarts and genuine,
heartfelt emotion to fill any three of live-action films currently clogging
the multiplexes.
Brooks does a fine job with conveying Marlin's
overprotective parental anxieties while also successfully playing straight
man to DeGeneres' scene-stealing turn as the absent-minded Dory. Gould is
also great as Nemo, while Willem Dafoe, Allison Janney, Brad Garrett and
Vicki Lewis as fellow fish tank captives who try to help Nemo reunite with
his dad, Geoffrey Rush as a seagull and Barry Humphreys, a.k.a. Dame Edna,
as a shark named Bruce, are all also first-rate.
If all film productions took the time the same way the
folks at Pixar Animation Studios do to develop and produce the best film
possible, maybe going to the movies wouldn't so often be an ordeal. Since that is
unlikely to happen, we'll just have to consider ourselves lucky that at
least one studio does and be grateful for them turning out gems like Finding Nemo.
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