"Finding Nemo" features all of the typical delights of Pixar's animation style, including the absurdity and humor of "Monsters Inc.", "Toy Story," and "A Bug's Life." It's also one of those rare films where I wanted to sit in the front row and allow the pictures wash out to the limits of my field of vision because of its unexpected beauty and masterful use of color and form. The majority of the film is set underwater, among vibrant tropical fish and the plants and animals of a shallow warm-water shelf near Australia. Even without the plot, the picture is enjoyable due to its creative use of color, form, and movement.
However, there's a tale—one of those Pixar creations—that engages children in the action while entertaining adults with satire and human (or fishy) humor. The film follows the exploits of little Nemo, a clown fish with an enormous curiosity and an undersized fin from birth. Because Nemo is all that his father, Marlin, has left—his mother and all of her other eggs were stolen by barracudas—he frets excessively over him. Marlin tells Nemo on his first day of school to stay with the class and avoid the risks of the drop-off to deep water, but Nemo forgets and winds himself a prisoner in a Sydney dentist's saltwater tank. Marlin dives off.
The actors who play these characters are well-known to us from their own personal ways; I was able to identify the majority of their voices, but even the voices I couldn't identify had hidden connections from past parts in movies, which is why the fish manage to acquire human characteristics. For instance, Ellen DeGeneres portrays Marlin as a neurotic, overly protective worrier, and Albert Brooks plays Dory, who is helpful, upbeat, and clumsy due to a short-term memory issue. Under the direction of writer-director Andrew Stanton, the Pixar computer animators construct an underwater environment that is slightly foggy, as it should be; because we can't see as far or as sharply in sea water, threats appear more rapidly and everything has a soft focus. The images in "Finding Nemo" have a surreal quality to them that makes one think of scuba diving fantasies.
The main idea behind the picture is to get Nemo out of the water and into that large tank in the dentist's office. We get to see other prisoners in it, such as the Willem Dafoe-voiced Moorish Idol fish Gill, who is plotting an escape. Although it may seem impossible for a fish to escape from an aquarium in an office, go through a window, cross a highway, and enter the sea, these animals are incredibly clever, especially when they have assistance from an outside conspirator—a pelican that sounds like Geoffrey Rush.
While it may occur to you that many pelicans do not rescue fish; rather, they make their living by devouring them, some of the characters in this film have made a commendable transition to vegetarianism. For example, Marlin and Dory come upon three carnivores who have started a Fish-Eaters Anonymous chapter and yell at them to remember not to eat fins while on their adventure.
When we learn that "Finding Nemo" is going to be about fish instead of people (or people-based characters like toys and monsters), the opening moments of the film are a little unnerving. Animated animals have, of course, long since figured out how to include all other species into the human race, so caring about fish becomes as natural as caring about mice or ducks or Bambi.
When I write a review for a film such as "Finding Nemo," I know that the majority of its target audience doesn't read reviews. Their parents do, and I can state that "Finding Nemo" is enjoyable for adults, both for them and for those without children as a justification. We get some jokes that the children don't, and we can appreciate the intricacy of Albert Brooks' neuroses and the vast canvas adorned with creatures that share a mesmerizing beauty similar to fish in an aquarium. Another novelty that they might enjoy is that, unlike in other animations, the mother is virtually always the protagonist this time around.
