‘Finding Nemo’

The latest Pixar-Disney collaboration has heart and plenty of fun along the way.   [G]

By: Jay Boyar
   Finding Nemo is a find.
   A computer-animated undersea adventure from those dependable Pixar pros, it has humor, heart and a storytelling style that can only be called fluid.
   This is one fish story you can really believe in. And it’s also a father-and-son story — the son being Nemo and his father being Marlin, both of them small, orange-and-white clown fish who live in a sea anemone.

"Three
Three sensitive sharks — a great white named Bruce, a hammerhead named Anchor and a mako named Chum — extend a friendly invitation to Marlin the clown fish and Dory the blue tang in Finding Nemo.


   If Marlin is an overprotective dad, that’s understandable. Early in the film, he loses his wife and a zillion baby eggs to a predator’s assault that only he and Nemo survive.
   "I promise I will never let anything happen to you, Nemo," vows Marlin, gazing solemnly at his still unhatched son.
   Yet Nemo is barely out of his shell when he’s captured by a human skin diver and trapped in an aquarium. Distraught and determined, Marlin sets out on a journey to locate his son.
   Is this starting to sound a little grim? Well, relax. Marlin’s desperate quest may give the movie its heart, but there’s plenty of fun along the way.
   The story takes place on two fronts, Marlin’s journey and Nemo’s captivity, with the emphasis on the former. It’s unexpected, and refreshing, that the adult, not the kid, turns out to be the main character in this family-friendly toon.
   It’s funny that Albert Brooks (The In-Laws), at his neurotic best, provides the humorously flat voice of father fish. Marlin may be a clown fish but he’s a worrier, not a jokester. In fact, whenever he attempts to tell his favorite joke — something about a mollusk and a sea cucumber — he, so to speak, flounders.
   For most of his journey, Marlin is paired with a lovely blue tang (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres) with short-term memory problems.
   "Can I help you?" the tang asks Marlin in impersonal store-clerk tones, after she has known him for a while. But eventually, just being with Marlin seems to improve her memory.
   Much of the fun of Finding Nemo is in the variety of characters that Marlin meets along the way, and in the visual variety of the ways they’re presented. Each character has his or her own distinctive method of moving through the water, and each sequence has its own look and feel.
   Among those Marlin meets is a sea-turtle dude, whose hilariously spacey voice is that of first-time director Andrew Stanton. Marlin also encounters a school of fish that does collective impressions, a jungle of dangerous jellyfish and a trio of sharks (Barry Humphries, Eric Bana and Bruce Spence) that form a support group for not eating fish.
   "Fish are friends, not food," they pledge, just before they fall off the wagon. Little Nemo (Alexander Gould), meanwhile, makes new friends in a dentist’s-office aquarium, including an amusingly adhesive starfish (Allison Janney), an explosive blowfish (Brad Garrett), a French shrimp (Joe Ranft) with neat-freak tendencies and a tough-but-sympathetic moorish idol (Willem Dafoe). It’s a hoot that all these aquatic characters, plus a pelican (Geoffrey Rush) that visits from time to time, seem to know everything there is to know about dentistry.
   In fact, it’s all pretty much a hoot. This latest Pixar-Disney collaboration lives up to the proud, new tradition of Monsters, Inc., A Bug’s Life and the Toy Story films.
   So next time you’re trolling the waters of the multiplex, don’t let Finding Nemo be the one got away.
Jay Boyar is the movie critic of the Orlando Sentinel. © 2003 by Orlando Sentinel Communications. All Rights Reserved.