Flak Magazine: Finding Nemo, 06-05-03

Pixar is, plain and simple, a confluence of great minds, great artists, great taste, great technology; the right time, the right place, the right people, the right attitude, the right judgment. Rivers of talent flowing together to produce a stream of great films. Consistently, Pixar, the studio responsible for two Toy Stories, A Bug's Life and Monsters, Inc., has not only produced great animation, but also inspired other studios to do so. Its rickety partner Disney certainly rediscovered risk-taking with recent efforts The Emperor's New Groove and Lilo and Stitch, and Fox's Ice Age shows an apt pupil's understanding of character and technical splendor. But Pixar shows no signs of flagging in its role as the frontrunner, producing beautiful, funny and touching films like Finding Nemo.

Perennial Pixar writer Andrew Stanton co-wrote and co-directed Finding Nemo, the story of a painfully overprotective clownfish racing across the ocean to save his son, Nemo (Alexander Gould). Marlin (Albert Brooks) has reason to be protective: His wife and the rest of his brood were killed by a predator. But Marlin's ceaseless smothering pushes Nemo into his first real act of rebellion, during which he is scooped up by a diver and whisked away to a fish tank in a Sydney dental office. Marlin makes desperate chase, accompanied by Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), a by-chance sidekick with a shorter-than-short-term memory who's equal parts help and hindrance. Meanwhile, Nemo plans his own escape from the fish tank under the tutelage of Gill, a chronic escapist with the grave, gravelly voice of Willem Dafoe.

It's interesting that the proper actors can do so well to add to animation — voice-over work for animation is notoriously anti-Actor-with-a-capital-A because it involves playing opposite a wall and being over-directed by animators searching for just the right line reading. But Nemo's actors, especially DeGeneres, give the film a lot of its charm. Sidekicks, as opposed to teams, are always tricky. Most of the time, they are vehicles for excess sass or catchphrases. DeGeneres, though, plays it just right. She is able to cap a dramatic scene with humor without ruining the efficacy of the prior drama — it takes smarts to play dumb this well. It's a good balance to Brooks, who sets aside his characteristic immaturity to play a mature father.

The characters in Nemo face stiff competition for attention, though, as intricate shots of the ocean floor relegate following storylines to second-tier importance. It's not just the bright colors of the layers of coral reef. It's the rough texture of an incidental buoy, the design on the tikis in the fish tank. Pixar must have known the backgrounds are one of the major stars of the film; rather than show the usual comic outtakes during the credits, they give these tableaus a glory lap. The other stars are the little particles drifting in the water. They work like extras — not distracting the eye but filling the water with substance so the fish don't seem to be flying in air. Just as with Sully's hairs from Monsters, Inc. the tiny particles in the water show how the most meticulous lines of code are integral to the splendor of a film like this.

The humans portrayed in Finding Nemo are a big advance for computer animation, in that they have finally embraced stylization. Without caricaturization, computer-animated people look like clunky mannequins — the kid on the receiving end of Mike's stand-up in Monsters, Inc. did. The most expressive human character so far in Pixar's films has been their most stylized: Geri, the toy repairer from Toy Story 2 and the chess player from the short film Geri's Game. In Nemo, the human characters also look like cartoons, and it's great. When the dentist's patients poke their head into the frame, those heads have an unnatural, geometric touch, and it's just the sort of thing that computer-animated humans need to be watchable.

Like an increasing number of blockbusters, including The Lord of the Rings trilogy and X2, Finding Nemo leans toward a brisk, episodic plot. Marlin and Dory meet imposing sharks, a monstrous deep sea fish, jellyfish, adventuresome turtles and a pelican voiced by Geoffrey Rush in quick-yet-satisfying passages bookended by scenes of Nemo. The episodic structure is tuned to kids' attention spans and keeps the movie rolling at an captivating pace; unfortunately, it also creates competition between the plot points, as the final climax struggles and somewhat fails to outdo the emotional weight of many of the mini-climaxes that came before.

Nemo offers plenty of frights for those climaxes — it's fraught with the dangers of the ocean: barracudas, sharks, deep water monsters. It's also viscerally violent, with explosions and bombastic chase scenes. But it's dangerous and scary with a purpose, dramatizing objects of fear to underline the importance of taking risks and overcoming those fears. Importantly and ironically, the violence is not cartoonish. The are only a few instances of physical harm in the film — a nose bleed, a jellyfish sting — but they, unlike most films aimed at children, connect the ideas of consequences to violence.

Pixar's movies are an example of moviemaking by committee, but unlike most films made that way, they're great. It must be because they are all artists, not businessmen reading test audiences' responses. (It's been reported that because test audiences for their upcoming Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas liked the dog more than the hero, Dreamworks cut scenes to give more room to the comical pooch — is it any wonder which studio is losing the animation war?) The people at Pixar simply know how to make a great film, and Finding Nemo is one more in a long line.

— Andy Ross (apross@earthlink.net)