Finding Nemo

Rating: 9/10 (17 June 2016)

"Finding Nemo" is one of the crowning achievements of Pixar. It's exhilarating, genuinely funny (even for mature audiences), sweet, and, most importantly, it's got a great message. Minor Spoilers.
The film starts in one of Pixars most heartbreaking openings where Marlin, a clown fish, comes back to his anemone to find his wife gone (dead, but it doesn't show her dead, obviously) and the only surviving egg of one of the hundreds of eggs that there used to be. He names him Nemo, a name his wife suggested before she died. His "lucky" fin is a little messed up, but Marlin is determined not to lose Nemo to the point of being over protective. And, ironically, this over protectiveness is what gets Nemo taken away from Marlin. Marlin is so overprotective that Nemo ends up wanting to be away from him every chance he gets. This means that when Marlin swims all the way to catch up with Nemo's class on his first day of school, Nemo has no problem doing something very dangerous just to spite him. This results in Nemo being captured, and so Marlin's journey begins.
The first thing Marlin learns is that the sea is a friendlier place than he expected. He meets Dory, an optimistic, but pretty annoying fish with short term memory loss. She begins to follow him around and they meet sharks. But the sharks don't want to hurt them. In fact, they bring them to a meeting in which they show that they are trying to stop eating fish. Of course, one of the sharks tries to eat them, but only after he smells blood. Soon enough, Marlin learns that Dory, a fish with memory loss, can read, and she even remembered what she read this time. Soon we learn that help presents itself to him in ways he wouldn't expect, and he must keep an open mind to find his son again. Thank God he has Dory to do this for him, and all of the other kind voices along the way, including a pack of fish doing impressions, a surprisingly friendly pelican, and a sea turtle named Crush, who teaches him that you must let your child figure out the world for themselves to a certain extent, and then they learn not only how to get back to their father, but why they want to. Just like Dory, for a child, their home is where their father is (or in this case, Marlin) and vice versa.
In the climatic moment of the film, the main points are stressed that the characters have learned along the way. First of all, you cannot do everything alone, hence the fish all swimming downward together. Second of all, you cannot give up no matter what, even when it seems hopeless, as it has for both Nemo and Marlin many times throughout the film, hence just keep swimming. Third of all, Marlin learns to trust his son, and others along with him, and this is only reinforced in the final scene of the film in which rather than Nemo waking up Marlin, Marlin wakes up Nemo to school. He also races him to the class, and finally, Nemo swims back to Marlin to tell him he loves him, rather than Marlin swimming to catch up with Nemo's to scold him for something he almost did.