An Underwater Treasure!

Rating: 10/10 (31 March 2015)

Pixar's animation wonder Finding Nemo, is a shimmery, velvety undersea coming-of-age story which is aglow with translucent sea flora and gleaming, iridescent creatures. Australia's Great Barrier Reef provides a stunning starting point for this aquatic parable. Nemo (Alexander Gould) is a spunky little clown-fish with a slight disability - a foreshortened front fin. Nemo's single father, Marlin (Albert Brooks) is a dry, wry clown-fish with an excess of anxiety (He is also a clown who can't tell a joke, though he keeps trying to do so quite hilariously). Despite Marlin's suffocating attention, his small fry is scooped up by a scuba diving dentist and gets separated from his father. Determined not to lose his son, Marlin begins a long, arduous albeit seemingly hopeless rescue mission across the sea and soon bumps into an overly exuberant, sweetly scatterbrained regal blue tang named Dory (Ellen DeGeneres). They search for Nemo together in the face of stinging jellyfish, exploding mines, noxious sharks and other irritable flounders. In the meantime, Nemo makes some very good friends in the dentist's aquarium, including a tiger fish (Willem Dafoe) who helps him plan an escape. From then on, it's a relentless journey of visual excitement and wonder, as the distraught father sets off to rescue his offspring and Nemo finds ways to escape from the aquarium. As is mandatory for a family film, there are plenty of life lessons for kids to learn, but they come sugar-coated with humor and fun. Meanwhile, a more adult undercurrent offers grown-up laughs, and there's even some old-fashioned tear-jerking to complete the emotional roller-coaster ride.
Andrew Stanton plays the viewer like a fiddle, and it's a privilege to be played. Its animation is truly stunning, awash (pun intended) in a dazzling array of colors and creating the impression of a living, breathing sea. Every moment is magnificently orchestrated to tease a response from us - anything from awe to aw-shucks. Yes, it's a visual feast, but more importantly it's an epic journey filled with adventure and discovery that encompasses the grandest sweep of the ocean's vastness and the tiniest longing of the heart. While preserving the characters' intrinsic "fishy-ness", the silver- tongued voice cast offers great supplementary texture to a marvelous sensory experience. While Brooks is amusing as the ever fretful Marlin, it is DeGeneres who gives a bravura comic performance as the guileless but whacked-out Dory. Ceaselessly forgetful, her endearing Dory makes a difficult traveling companion but a scintillating friend – Dory is a complete hoot.
Instead of rising to a challenge, Finding Nemo plunges into it and comes up a winner. All in all, a buoyant adventure that manages to evoke the quicksilver trait of the ocean without necessarily feeling 'wet'!