Pixar goes to the fishes

Rating: 7/10 (26 February 2004)

This is a good film but overrated. There, I said it.
This was just too reminiscent of when 'Shrek' first hit the screens, in 2001  the 3D animation everyone was going gaga over, repeatedly hailing as the greatest animated movie ever, and yet didn't really impress me all that much. Seemingly, I was the only person on the planet to feel that way. I didn't really 'get' 'Shrek', don't especially 'get' it even now, and for some reason I didn't quite manage to 'get' 'Finding Nemo' either, the next 3D film to get the 'greatest animated movie' ever proclamation, in spite of the fact that I was really, really determined to kick off my socks and enjoy this one. Well, it's cute and it's colourful, and the idea of a father clownfish (named Marlin) trekking the ocean to be reunited with his missing son (named, oddly enough, Nemo) is a nice one for sure, but there was just something about it which left me feeling strangely unsatisfied. All in all it's a worthy venture for the Pixar cabinet, visually gorgeous and with a handful of effective moments, but seriously, they have done better.
The main problem comes in the story structure, which is too rambling and disjointed to do it for me. I actually agree with another viewer who commented that it felt more like that of a multi-levelled video game than a movie. All it really involves is Marlin swimming along and avoiding getting chomped by dangerous sea-dwelling predator after sea-dwelling predator. We meet plenty of interesting characters along the way, but the nature of the story means that they're removed from the action within minutes. For example, the trio of sinister but slow-witted sharks struggling to go veggie, who have a lot less screen time than the promotional posters and trailers might imply and are never given the chance to amount to much more than a few time-filling wisecracks. Nigel the pelican, in spite of Geoffrey Rush's spunky voicing, is a mostly bland character whose motives for befriending and assisting the fish are left conveniently unspoken (after all, naturally he's another sea-dwelling predator himself), and I found the surfer turtles just a tad annoying (particularly the young ones  call me heartless, but bleh!).
Another pretty nagging drawback is that neither protagonist, be it Marlin or Nemo, is nearly as sympathetic as past Pixar creations like Woody or Sulley. Marlin is too whiny to be truly likable, and Nemo doesn't really get the great deal of development you'd usually expect in a title character. The script is notably also less sharp than previous Pixar instalments. There was one scene in the dentist's waiting room which had me in stitches, but that was about it. It's mostly just movie in-jokes for most of the time. While in 'Toy Story' the various nods to other movies were little more than subtle extras for the sharp-eyed viewer to enjoy alongside a script brimming with plenty of witty gags of its own, they're pretty much integral to this screenplay. 'Finding Nemo' suffers from the same 'self-indulgent movie spoof' syndrome that you can find in most 3D animation from the Dreamworks stable, with a slew of constant parodies (that most of us have already seen at some point in 'the Simpsons') substituting for real humour. Usually, Pixar are always one step ahead of their rivals in this respect, but this time round even they were unable to resist succumbing to it.
There are certain aspects of 'Finding Nemo' that I liked. For example, Dory, the regal blue tang who trails Marlin insistently on his travels  technically she's as 2D as everyone else in this flick, her whole character consisting of little more than the one-joke comedy gimmick that she suffers from short term memory loss and can never remember quite what she's doing. There's so much potential here to be annoying, but somehow she manages to pull through and, against the odds, prove a surprisingly charming character throughout. Perhaps it comes down to Ellen DeGenere's brilliant voice work. Also, I like it that the standard comic relief sidekick can finally be female, and that Marlin and Dory manage to maintain an entirely platonic relationship throughout (no token love interests here).
But the most interesting character by far is William Dafoe's hard-bitten Moorish idol, Gill  he's given some hints of a personal history, yet it goes curiously understated throughout. Many of the 'Tank Gang' sequences seem pretty out of place (what does the welcome ritual have to add to the story, other than establishing the existence of that bubble volcano?), but nonetheless, some of the dialogue exchanged between Gill and Nemo is quite nice and add a sprinkling of depth to a film which I otherwise found to be just a little toohollow?
Plus, the sight of an angler fish caught up in a pair of diving goggles is unexpectedly alluring - still, the poor, poor creature ;)
'Finding Nemo' isn't a bad film by any means. In fact, it's pretty darn good. But Pixar have made other movies which, ironically, could blow this clean out of the water. In short, it's sweet and pleasant but  there's that word again - overrated.
Grade: B