A Fun Underwater Adventure

Rating: 8/10 (12 October 2009)

"Finding Nemo" is a very well done movie for the whole family. Technically, it has the high quality of animation that Disney/Pixar are famous for, but what it also had was another feature Disney is famous for that hasn't always been clear in some of its more recent work - it's real, and at times sad and tragic, and doesn't get lost in the idea that children should somehow be shielded from the reality that sometimes bad things happen. In an opening that reminded me a bit of Bambi's mom being killed, when clownfish Marlin loses his mate Coral and most of his babies in an attack from a predator you knew that this was not going to be just a silly cartoon. In the aftermath of the attack, Marlin is left to raise his only surviving child Nemo by himself. Not surprisingly, he becomes over-protective, Nemo becomes resentful and in the end Nemo is captured by divers and ends up living in a tank in a dentist's office while his dad desperately tries to find him and rescue him. This runs the whole range of emotions - it's happy, it's sad, it's funny (the sharks who belong to the AA-type group - "fish are friends, not food" - are hilarious) and in its own way it's very educational for young ones, as the animation really does give them a sense of what some of these creatures look like. Ironically, probably the worst animation (at least in the sense of not looking anywhere close to real) was of the humans who periodically appear in the movie. Clearly, another winner for Disney/Pixar. 8/10