Finding Nemo (2003)

Finding Nemo

Full Price Feature

I saw this movie twice in 48 hours; it would have been sooner save for an out of town wedding. The interim was filled with laughing about and quoting from the movie. The truly amazing things about Pixar is that ins the case of every film they make, I go into the theatre with incredibly high, even unrealistic expectations, and I leave the theatre astounded at the high level of comedy, aesthetic beauty, and ingenuity I have just experienced.

Finding Nemo is at its core a story about an overprotective father searching for a lost son. Wrapped around that core is a great buddy comedy starring the father and a happy, witless helper companion, - and it's also a character-driven fish out of water comedy. So to speak. It is for kids and adults alike, like all of Pixar's offerings, so if you're one of those misdirected animation naysayers, well, you just enjoy your deep, layered adult film offerings like 2 Fast 2 Furious and leave us room in the theatre for our guts busting.

Marlin the dad (who is actually a clownfish) is voiced by Albert Brooks, who has codified a more charming post-Woody Allen neurotic fussiness into his acting, and it serves him well here. His blue companion Dory is voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, who rules the film with her impeccable timing and line readings. My god, that woman is funny in this movie!

It certainly doesn't hurt that writer/director Andrew Stanton's character animators smoothly and eerily capture the subtle facial expressions of these two gifted actors - onto fish! A very large supporting cast of voice talent (not to mention animation talent) people the rest of the seas between Marlin's home reef and the final goal of Sydney, Australia.

The comedy is high and low. The kids in our theatre (as close as the next seat) were riveted from start to finish. When the room wasn't filled with laughter, the packed theatre audience was as reverently rapt and silent as a Manhattan art house. One in my group bent all the way to his knees repeatedly laughing, and the rest of us were only a few degrees of incline behind. The jokes are smart, the story engaging, and the science/zoology was sound.

It's no secret that Pixar puts out some of the most amazingly detailed and richly rendered CGI sets and characters ever projected. If you didn't know that, get thee to a Hollywood Video, stat! In A Bug's Life, the natural textures and transparencies of nature were so real they boggled the mind. In Monsters Inc they pioneered animation of fur and hair for unheard of manipulation and detail. Nemo is prefaced by a short from 1989 which is of course a fun warm-up, but also shows you how far they have come as artists (though it also proves they always had a way with a story). In Nemo, the obvious computing challenge is water: the surface of it, the murkiness and translucence of it, the movement of particles and objects within it. It's amazing, it's as if they took cameras into the depths of the sea and then released fully formed characters into the ocean to act. They met the computing challenges head on, and as always, stagger the mind with their attention to detail.

It's not just cutesy poo characters being brilliantly rendered. The writers care about good story, good jokes, believable characters, and funny gags everywhere. They toil for years and the results are awesome. The fact that shallow, poppy Shrek beat Monsters Inc for the first animated feature Oscar will rankle me to the grave. Finding Nemo is funny, sweet, amazing to look at, and a great movie. Go see it.

-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ These reviews (c) 2003 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. You can check out previous reviews at: http://www.cinerina.com and http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/listing.hsbr - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource

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X-RT-RatingText: 5/5