Finding Nemo (2003)

Movie Info

Seriously, Dad…Back off!!!

A clownfish named Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks) and his wife Coral (voiced by Elizabeth Perkins) find an anemone for their eggs and plan for a new life.  When Coral is killed by a barracuda and all but one egg are eaten, Marlin vows to protect his child Nemo (voiced by Alexander Gould).  Nemo is taken by a diver who puts him in his work aquarium.  Marlin sets out to find Nemo, picking up a fish named Dory (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres) with short term memory problems and encountering other undersea creatures like a recovering shark named Bruce (voiced by Barry Humphries) and hip sea turtle named Crush (voiced by Andrew Stanton).  As Marlin’s journey crosses the ocean, time is running out for Nemo who’s scheduled to go to the dentist’s fish killing niece Darla.

School of fish…I get it, I get it…

Directed by Andrew Stanton (who also voiced Crush), Finding Nemo was a big hit for Pixar.  The movie received positive reviews and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film.  The film was a massive money maker which made even more when it was released in 3-D in 2012.

People love Finding Nemo…I like Finding Nemo.  I have to say first off that of animated films, I’m not a huge fan of computer animated film and favor classic animation.  Finding Nemo like most of Pixar films however does look fantastic and pays great detail to everything from the sea creatures to the different clarity levels of the oceans.  This is backed up by great voice acting by Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Alexander Gould, Brad Garrett, Stephen Root, Allison Janney, Vicki Lewis, Eric Bana, Elizabeth Perkins, Barry Humphries, Bruce Spence, and Pixar mainstay John Ratzenberger.  The look and sound is amazing and regardless what I think about the style of the animation, I can’t fault it.

…and the fish of the aquarium proceded to eat Nemo.

My problem with Finding Nemo and many of the Pixar stories is that I think they try too hard to be funny and entertain adults.  Finding Nemo does have some genuine laugh-out-loud moments (for me, most of them involve the aquarium fish), but I feel there are too many jokes put in and that the film loses some of the sentimentality that it could have easily built up even more.

One interesting aspect of the film was the idea of having “disabled” fish.  Both Nemo and Dory are “handicapped”.  Nemo has a smaller misshaped fin and Dory has serious memory issues.  It was smart to add these features to the film as a way of introducing children to people with challenges at a young age, and I think they were both handled well here.

Bruce was the name given to the shark in Jaws

Finding Nemo is a good movie, but not necessarily my type of movie.  I think that some of the sentimentality that could have been used is lost by the number of jokes, and I wish that it had taken itself a bit more serious at points.  The movie did spark a bit of environmental backlash in that many people wanted to have clownfish and didn’t realize how difficult a saltwater tank is to maintain…also “All drains lead to the ocean” is false, and Nemo would probably have ended up Nemo nuggets if he had tried.  Finding Nemo is to be followed by Finding Dory in 2015.