A Pixar Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (24 October 2009)

Of Pixar's ongoing streak of CGI animated classics, I've always admired 2003's "Finding Nemo" the most. For a movie a about talking fish, sharks, pelicans, and turtles, it may be the most humane and endearing film of the last decade.
Like "Up", it opens with a tragedy: a shark devours Coral, the wife of Clownfish Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks), and all but one of their 400 eggs, leaving an overprotective Marlin to raise Nemo (Alexander Gould), who is handicapped by a short fin. When Nemo is captured by humans and placed in a fish tank, Marlin teams up with Dory (Ellen Degeneres), a regal tang, to rescue him.
"Finding Nemo" does to the ocean what "Up" does to the air. The water becomes a vibrantly illustrated, fully developed setting. We see schools of fish, sunken ships, and powerful currents. 'Eye-candy' is an understatement, and the setting makes the adventure all the more thrilling.
In the fish tank scenes, "Finding Nemo" presents one of the most hilarious scenarios in recent memory as the captive fish, led by Gill (Willem Dafoe), scheme to escape back to the ocean. These scenes are clever, tense, and surprisingly involving. Meanwhile, Dory, suffering from a "Memento"-like short-term memory condition, is as lovable as she is funny.
Laughs aside, Marlin's single-minded determination and Nemo's wonderful resilience really pull the audience into the story. "Shark Tale," from the very next year, took place in a similar setting but saturated its story with generic characters and ill-conceived pop-culture references (unlike the brief and clever quips in "Finding Nemo"). The fish looked like the celebrities voicing them, and the effect was vain and artificial. In "Finding Nemo," the vocal performances by Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, and the other actors fit their roles perfectly, and as a result we forget about the actors and accept the characters. Children raised on "Hannah Montana" deserve films as straightforward and good-hearted as "Finding Nemo."