Film Review #77: Finding Nemo

When I first saw the newspaper article saying that Finding Nemo had displaced The Lion King as the most successful animated film of all time, I was completely shocked.  Finding Nemo is a film that absolutely stunned moviegoers and captivated an entire generation of kids into wanting to be animators at Disney and Pixar.  It was critically acclaimed, every line was re-enacted, and every scene talked about.  For 2003, at least, Finding Nemo was the film to see for all ages.  So...is it bad to say I think it's kind of overrated?  Now before I get any backlash for this one, just hear me out.  By no means at all is Finding Nemo a bad movie, on the contrary.  This is still one of the best animated films of all time.  There are just a few specific things in this film that are way too overblown, way too overanalyzed and way too overemphasized.

Plot: Clown fish Coral and Marlin have an entire group of a thousand eggs to watch over underneath their anemone.  But when a barracuda tragically kills Coral and all but one of the eggs, Marlin decides to care for the lone survivor, calling him Nemo.  Nemo was not without injury, having a withered fin from the injuries he sustained.

As Nemo grows up, Marlin is an extremely overprotective father, who wants nothing to happen to his son, even reluctant to send him off to school.  One day, Nemo and his friends are playing in the sea when they come across a boat.  Nemo is dared into touching the boat and goes off to touch it, getting captured by a scuba diving dentist in the process.  Marlin desperately searches for his son, but loses sight of the boat.  In the commotion, Marlin meets Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), a fish with short term memory loss.

Nemo finds himself in a fish tank that has a wide variety of characters, including the recluse fish named Gil (Willem Dafou), who tries to break the fish out and return to the ocean.  Now, he uses Nemo as a reason, as the dentist plans to give Nemo to his niece Darla, who shakes her fishes too hard in the baggy and often kills them.

Marlin and Dory travel throughout the ocean, encountering a gang of friendly yet hostile sharks, a colony of jellyfish, and a group of sea turtles swimming on the East Australian Current, while searching for Nemo.

What's Bad?: Finding Nemo is very much like a 1980's Don Bluth film, or a more recent comparison would be The Iron Giant or The Prince of Egypt.  The story often makes the audience sit through a near endless array of sorrow and emotional scenes, but always giving you a happy ending.  That, I have no problem with.  Each film also has the comic relief to keep the mood up and keeping it from an eternally gloomy mood.  Examples would include:

Tiger (Dom DeLuise) : An American Tail
Ducky and Spike (Judith Barsi): The Land Before Time
Lumiere and Cogsworth (Jerry Orbach and David Ogden Stiers): Beauty and the Beast
Timon and Pumbaa (Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella): The Lion King
Victor, Hugo, and Laverne (Charles Kimbrough, Jason Alexander, and Mary Wickes): The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hotep and Huy (Steve Martin and Martin Short): The Prince of Egypt
even R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars.

Unfortunately, against the popular consensus, I cannot stand Ellen DeGeneres in this movie.  I felt she was really out of place in a lot of scenes and I didn't find her that funny.  I didn't even like her when I was a kid.  I thought she was annoying and overly blown out.  So, you can imagine my happiness regarding the plan to make a sequel with Dory as the lead.

I know how I like animated films that challenges the audiences, but this one may go a bit too far in some places.  For instance, the scene when Dory gets stung by the jellyfish and loses Marlin in the pack.  That scene was a scene I couldn't sit through as a kid until I was 12.  Another scene is the failed attempt to clog the tank filter, which almost gets Nemo killed.  The film could have used a bit of a lighter mood, but not Jar Jar duh I mean Dory annoying.

What's Good?: Like The Lion King or The Prince of Egypt, the movie is huge in both scope and visuals.  Some of the scenes of them just swimming in the ocean are just breathtaking to watch.  Like with The Little Mermaid you can see the amount of time and detail put into the animation of the ocean and each little light reflection in the water.  Also, the places they encounter and the people they see and the experiences they go on are also epic in scale.  You can clearly see that Pixar was still putting their effort into this movie.

Overall: I do like this one.  I wish that some of the other films got more recognition and made a bit more money, but Finding Nemo is still a marvelous film in it's own right.  It is still a unique and srong achievement in the art of animation, which was now clearly, Pixar's game.

Final Grade: A