Swimmingly good

Rating: 8/10 (26 December 2007)

I'll confess straight away to having a fish-tank indoors and admit to loving my fish. I've always coveted the tropical fish tank with their beautiful colouring but never been encouraged to take them on as they're notoriously short-lived. This lovely animated feature showed me what I 've been missing as well as royally entertaining me too. The twin stories are skilfully inter-cut in a proper cinematic way, combining Marlin & Dory's ocean-wide search for Nemo is well inter-cut with Nemo's attempts to escape captivity from the evil fish-tank (now I feel guilty about owning one!). The dialogue is smart, occasionally funny, rarely sentimental and well delivered by the not-so-starry cast (and all the better for it - people like Hanks and Murphy hardly need the income after all), even if Albert Brooks as Marlin keeps reminding me of a young Mel Brooks!. The real stars of course are the animators, bringing to life, well, sort of, all manner of aquatic effects, from a shoal of fish on the move, to turtles riding the current and even the depiction of whales in motion. There's a light ecological message too as you'd expect, pushed just far enough to register but not repel, particularly with the children in the primary target-audience and of course the expected stuff about father - son relationships, growing pains, generation gap - can't believe I'm writing this about a movie about cartoon fish. Anyway, lasting a just-right 90 minutes, Finding Nemo is a pleasant warm-hearted family entertainment and I'll certainly think twice next time my fish-tank filter breaks down!