okay, everybody calm down

Rating: 10/10 (11 August 2004)

After a good year has passed (well, it wasn't really a good year in my life, nor was it a good year in the cinema, but it was undoubtedly a long year, allow us all to the calm down. Finding Nemo is a children's movie. It is not an achingly poetic masterwork of biblical proportions. For all its polished aesthetic splendor, it is one of many recent Pixar cuddle-tear smorgasboards that have smack of the Pixar "formula." This is, of course, more multifaceted than you might hope. First, and foremost there is the element of the micro society where one least expects it: the anthropomorphic personification in various aspects of the animal kingdom or underwater or inanimate objects like toys, insects pretty much anything that looks cute. Pixar, which has modeled itself on Disney (for starters...in that, it is trying and succeeding to be the 2nd successful animation studio in the history of the cinema) is taking a page from Herr Walt, but not just simply by making animals...talk. There is the now mandatory wacky assortment of characters in whatever new environment our cutesy little poopy poof protagonist enters: usually an inexplicably dumb character, a hardened, raspy-voiced pessimist who has the seen the outside and yearns for a taste of liberation, a simple character driven mad by the plasticized existence of the microcosm they are confined to, the optimist, completely spiritually and intellectually fulfilled with appeasing the idiotic requests of the master, or overlord or Orwellian gumbent-a-clef, easing into a life of quiet desperation, finding simple pleasures in the banal daily regimen and the emigrant, caught in the middle. Perhaps these scenarios which Pixar seems to be ejaculating in majestic, new colors every few years are truly subversive and anti-American with their One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nestesque allegories...or maybe they're just smoking PCP. Still, they're a whole lot better than the CGA DreamWorks is churning out. Don't believe me? Compare the Incredibles (which is going to rock ass even if it sucks because look at Sam Jackson's character, man is HE black!) to Shrek 2. Shrek 2 sucked. For more on Shrek 2, see Shrek 2. Eddie Murphy needs to quit. C