A Joyous Encouragement to Expand One's Experience and Acumen of One's Environment and Inhabitance

Rating: 9/10 (18 May 2009)

Andrew Stanton's rejuvenation of Pixar by deep-sea adventure is a joyous encouragement to expand one's experience and acumen of one's environment and inhabitance. Look at Marlin, Albert Brooks' clownfish protagonist. In the opening scene, his wife is eaten by a barracuda along with all of their eggs, except for one. Marlin finds that egg and promises it he will never leave it, naming it Nemo. His journey is a testament to the catharsis and philanthropic imposition of chaotic situations, ones that happen within the context of the natural pitfalls of one's existential habitat. Parallel to his titular quest for Nemo is Nemo's own quest for the sanctuary of his father, and so in the superconscious of this deep-sea adventure, opposite energies are negotiated. Marlin's principle of orderly civilization, maintained by fear and the haunting wounds of his loss, is converged with the reality of messy nature. Stanton's precept paints the natural world with a wildly natural brush.
The Pixar films are the American vanguard's long-overdue equivalent of Japan's Ghibli Studios anime films by Miyazaki and Takahata. The reason is that they are creating a new standard for American family films, filtering out the complacence and tampered ideology of the contemporary cartoon-animated Disney films and the like. This has, naturally, been ignored in pertinence to this particular film: The film's prominent use of clownfish prompted mass purchase of the animal as pets in America, even though the movie portrays the use of fish as pets with strong negativity and saltwater aquariums as elaborately tricky and expensive to maintain. In Vanuatu, clownfish were being caught on a large scale for sale as pets, motivated by the demand.
But I believe a lot of kids know better. A movie like Finding Nemo portrays nature not only as something to fear and not only as something to seek out, but both, enmeshed in a sort of way that applies to what these characters, Merlin, Nemo, a flighty little regal tang called Dory with Ellen DeGeneres' voice, learn about themselves. They are oppressed by the sea's natural peril, but transformed by experiencing the very nature of the sea.
The film has its handful of cornier moments, bits of humor that are meant more for the clean minds of wholesome children and their mothers, but they do not detract any more than they may in one of Steven Spielberg's more fantastical films for younger audiences. It nonetheless assumes you are absorbed in its world rather than popping it into the VCR during a birthday party. It makes sense, it tells a thematically diverse story, it has lessons, and it's moving. But more than anything, it's fun.