Finding Nemo

There. Now that I've said that, I should tell you that this is NOT solely a childrens' movie, but will be enjoyed as much (if not more) by adults. The cleverness of Pixar will never cease to amaze me. Only they could take a concept like a full-length movie about fish and make it totally believable. This film succeeds n being very, very funny. Heck, I'm 16 and saw it in the theater with only my mother. The two of us were laughing hysterically throughout the entire thing!

There's alot of sadness and emotion in this movie and some absolutely terrific voice acting--the voice cast is top-notch. There are some touching moments and subtle messages to be heard by all, not just kids. I look forward with anticipation to the DVD release of this wonderful movie. The suspense never lets up; encounters with jellyfish, a whale, and a deep-sea lanturn fish make every moment exciting.

As we know, every Disney/Pixar film is associated with its own special "short." Well, this one is the best yet, and the short film sets you up for the great feelings you'll have while seeing "Finding Nemo." I won't give away the storyline, but it involves a cute snowman, a water globe, and some tropical souvenirs that completely ready one for the overwhelming tropical-ness of the feature film.

One thing I can't get over is how true-to-life these characters are. The attention to finding a unique species for each fish is incredible and adds a whole new, educational, dimension to the movie. There are some memorable characters in "Finding Nemo." First and foremost is Marlin, the lovable clownfish who is an overprotective father to his adventurous son, Nemo. Then there's Dory, the regal blue tang with the memory problem. She provides much of the comic relief but is also an immensely "real" character. Bruce is a mako shark who wants to get rid of the typical image of sharks as mindless eating machines. Crush is a 150-year-old sea turtle with a cool-surfer-dude attitude. Nigel is a helpful pelican. The whole thing takes place in the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia.

And then there are the aquarium fish, who invite Nemo into their 'club' when he gets scooped from the sea. He goes through the initiation ceremony at Mt. Wannahockaloogee, complete with tiki statues and all. The animation is awesome. Their group includes Peach, the lookout starfish; Deb, a delusional fish who thinks her reflection is her sister; a French shrimp, a puffer fish, a yellow tang, and a royal gramma. They are led by Gill, a moorish idol who longs to return to the ocean.

This film is excellent; it deserves a sequel...

Overall this is one film that nobody should miss--parents, kids, or otherwise. I hope this review has convinced you to go get yourself a ticket to "Finding Nemo."


Pixar's getting in a habit of constantly outdoing themselves   June 7, 2003
Gary Jaffe
124 out of 132 found this review helpful

Finding Nemo is the fifth installment for Pixar Studios, the most reliable studio in Hollywood today, and it is my personal favorite. The first obviously outstanding aspect of the movie is the animation. From the breathtaking wonder of the Great Barrier Reef, to the cold, sterile fish tank, the animation is top notch and truly state of the art. The water, which has always been the bane of animation, is picture perfect, and the animators have captured the rolling but constant ocean and the light refractions perfectly. But animation itself doesn't make a film. Finding Nemo's strongest aspect is it's warm, witty, heartfelt, and funny story of a father's quest to reclaim his son. The kids will love the vibrant characters and funny situations, and so will the parents. However, the parents will be able to enjoy the film on a level far more than the kids will. The story is about losing a child, and the desperate quest to be reunited, which will hit the parent right in the gut. This is the story's dark side, which has, thankfully, not been sugar coated by the creators. Overall, lets just say Halleluja, Pixar, you've done it again!


Another fantastic family hit from Pixar   June 23, 2003
Shelley Shay (Denton, TX **(God Bless the USA!!)**)
92 out of 113 found this review helpful

Pixar has outdone themselves once again. "Finding Nemo" is the dramatic, sometimes sad & scary, sometimes drop-dead hilarious, tale (or should I say "tail"?) of a Father trying to find his lost son. In this case, the father (voice over by Albert Brooks), Marlin, is a clownfish living in a sea anemone. His son, Nemo, evokes images of Dicken's "Tiny Tim" character with his defective fin.

In light of todays news headlines where children are forcibly kidnapped from their own homes, the opening of the film may be too intense and overwhelming for some sensitive youngsters.

As with its other movies ("Toy Story," "Monsters, Inc.," etc.), the story is so well written, it can be enjoyed by children and adults alike.

As someone who has a salt water aquarium at home with a pair of clownfish and a regal tang (the species of Dory, played by Ellen DeGeneres), I know first hand how these fish move through water and interact with other fish in the tank.

It's obvious that the artists involved in animating these characters studied their biology and behavior for hours on end. A few times, the fish are literally out of the water, and as the water on their skin begins to drip off, you can see the subtle highlights in their scales. Magnificent work.

Obviously, the fish are given human-like eyes... a truly necessary component to get you emotionally involved with these characters.

Even Bruce, the Great White shark, is an endearing fellow with an Australian accent. Despite the human-like characteristics, the adherence to physiological details on the rest of these species is incredible.

The lighting has such an effect that you feel like you are under water with the fish. The gentle swaying of the coral and anemones is surreal... just like the real Great Barrier Reef.

In reality, some of these fish would never encounter each other in the wild... and we all know that Starfish do not have eyes or smiley faces... but you do not care about those minor details while watching this film.

Dory is the beautiful blue & yellow regal tang fish who teams up with Marlin to find his son. Her tendency to forget almost everything she hears is a part of the charm of this character. Ellen DeGeneres' voice was perfect for this fish. The facial expressions on the characters, modeled after the actors that did their voices, are also priceless.

This movie is far more than eye-candy. The story and comedic timing are so good, it could be done with stick-figures and still be good.

This movie is an absolute delight. When it is released on DVD, it will immediately be added to my collection - this is a film I could see time and time again.


Walt Would Approve   October 18, 2003
Nicholas Stix (New York City/Queens)
69 out of 71 found this review helpful

Recently, I saw Albert Brooks on Late Night with David Letterman, talking about Finding Nemo. Brooks, who stars as the voice of Marlon, the daddy fish, had taken his son (who, I believe was about five years old, the equivalent human age of Nemo), to the premiere. After about five minutes, Brooks said his son leaned over to him, and quietly said, the way a grownup might, "I cannot watch this movie," and walked out. Late in the movie, the son returned, having obviously been crying. Leaning over, Brooks assured his son, "You are not Nemo."

Such is the power of this fish story about father and son clownfish who become separated, and must struggle to find their way back to each other. Marlon is a loving but neurotic and overprotective father; Nemo is a frustrated young fish who wants to be independent and see the world, and resents his father for preventing him from doing so. We see an ocean (read: the world) that is a terrible, heartless, and yet joyous place that we frail fish must confront, as best we can, because there's no alternative.

The animation was done by the wonderful folks from Pixar, who are the closest thing to the reincarnation of Walt Disney. There is simply no comparison between the animation of the typical, visually flat, politically correct, contemporary animated movie (many of which are produced by Walt Disney Pictures!) and Nemo. In Nemo, the ocean floor looks like the ocean. And the characters are all ... characters. They are all physically distinctive, wonderfully written, and performed by gifted actors who - if you'll pardon the cliche - will alternately make you laugh and cry. Of particular note are Barry Humphries as Bruce the Shark, Geoffrey Rush as Nigel the Pelican, Willem Dafoe as Gill, Allison Janney as Peach, and of course, young Alexander Gould as Nemo. Ellen Degeneres, in particular, steals every scene she's in, as Dory, a gregarious fish whose memory leaks like a sieve. But this is Albert Brooks' movie. The Academy should give this man a special Oscar for the most moving voice work my wife and I have ever heard.

Thomas Newman, of the musical Newman clan (Alfred, Lionel, Randy) has produced a score that is subtle and unobtrusive much of the time, but at dramatic moments takes over, and is more impressive, with repeated viewings. He deserves his fifth Oscar nomination for Nemo.

Andrew Stanton's (Toy Story, Monsters, Inc.) screenplay, written with Bob Peterson and David Reynolds, brims with intelligence and wit (e.g., in an AA-style group of recovering - and frequently lapsing - sharks, the members intone, "I am a nice shark, not an eating machine.... Fish are friends, not food"), and Stanton's direction does not waste a scene. Every moment in Nemo will either charm you or move you. In fact, as my wife remarked, for all of its many comic scenes, this is one of the most moving movies you'll ever see. We've already seen it several times with our three-and-a-half-year-old son, who loves it, and yet with each new viewing, we notice things we'd previously missed.

Though I wish Nemo would win all of the big Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Screenplay), I doubt Academy voters will choose it over its live-action competition. And yet, I will be very surprised, if a better picture -- live action or animated -- is released this year. Finding Nemo is truly a find.

Originally published in The Critical Critic, October 17, 2003.


Finding Nemo Rules!   September 27, 2003
Ed Mich (New York)
45 out of 64 found this review helpful

The Pixar movies just keep getting better and better. The two "Toy Story" movies were amazing, as was "A Bug's Life" and "Monsters Inc." Now they made a new movie in their animation studios called "Finding Nemo" with the voices of Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres taking on the main characters (er main fishes) voices. The joy of this movie is that it has beautiful animation, along with a script filled with humor and heart, that you just have to love it. Although the movie came out in May, when I first saw it I felt that I could not yet review it. It took me another two times to finally decide that I was ready to share with you the magic and wonder of this movie.

It begins a few years before the story begins. We are introduced to Marlin and Coral. Soon they will be parents to hundreds of little tiny fish. Coral wants to name one Nemo, because she thinks that it is a great name. But disaster then strikes when a bigger fish knocks Marlin out and proceeds to eat Coral and the baby eggs. But when Marlin wakes up he finds one little egg left which he promises not to let anything happen to it. He then commences to name this fish Nemo. A few years pass and it's Nemo's first day of school. Marlin doesn't trust the ocean and is scared to let his son leave home. He does and when the teacher takes the fish to the drop-off Marlin races to go find him. Nemo is with the class but he and some friends go to the end of the ocean where it goes down into the dark abyss. They see and boat and Marlin finds them. He tells Nemo to go with him but he goes off to touch the boat and in the process of returning, is captured by a diver. The divers boat speeds away and Marlin cannot catch up to it. He bumps into and meets Dory, a blue fish with short term memory loss. We find out that Nemo is in a fishtank along with felloe sea creatures of Gill, Bloat, Peach, Gurgles, Bubbles, Jacques, and Deb who believes that her reflection in the tank's glass is her twin sister flow. Gill hatches an escape plan to escape the fishtank which is in a dentist's office in Sydney Australia. They have to escape now because Nemo is a birthday gift to the dentist's fish killing neice Darla. As they plot to escape Dory and Marlin set off to find Nemo with the encounters of the likes of Nigel the pelican, Crush the turtle, and three sharks with the names of Bruce, Anchor, and Chum who are going through AA to stop eating fish. Nemo and Marlin race across the ocean to find Marlin's son.

Also before the feature there was a mini short called "Knick Knack" where a snowman inprisioned in the glass of a snowglobe tries to escape so he can get to his mermaid beauty toy, straight from the beautiful beaches of Miami. Sadly, seeing the movie three times, I had enough of that short after the first time. Unlike the movie, that short probally would only get about 2 or 3 stars, I would have to analyze it more if I was planning on giving it a full review.

But the short was made in 1989 almost fifteen years before "Finding Nemo" was made. It you watch both of them together like in the theatre, you would see that there is a big difference with the animation. Even without the note at the beginning saying what year it was made, you could probally guess that it was made more then a decade ago. Even with "Toy Story" and this movie. There is a huge difference in the way that the animation was made. On the "Monsters Inc" DVD there is a feature where you see how they made the fur on one of the monsters back flow with the wind. It's such a huge advancment in technology and it just blows my mind.

"Finding Nemo" wasn't made with regular animation. It used computer generated images to make the fish. Another movie that came out this summer which I have yet to see called "Sinbad Legend of the Seven Seas" did the opposite of this and made it with older animation. But there is something about the computer image that just makes everything look so real, mabye because it is real. Mabye there is some kind reality to everything. Look at the character of Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings:The Two Towers." Wasn't that a real person that they used a computer to make him look like a scary slimy creature. Animation alone in movies just makes you think hard. That is another beauty of Nemo's world.

Yes. This is probally one of the greatest movies of the year if not all time. The characters are just so great. Even when you know that Nemo is not in grave danger, you want Marlin just to race across the ocean and rescue his son. You want them to be together and even though you know he's fine, you still fear for Nemo. You grow to love these characters at the instant that you are first introduced to them, and that is great filmmaking. I loved "Finding Nemo" and I think that you will too.

ENJOY!

Rated G

Finding Nemo 5 stars/5
Knick Knack 2 1/2 stars/5