"It's About a Stupid Fish!" ...But it's from Pixar, Which Makes All the Difference

Last Saturday, my six-year old niece was asked if she wanted to go see "Finding Nemo," Pixar's latest computer-animated film, and she stubbornly said, "Why would I want to see that? It's just about a stupid FISH!" So she didn't see it.

Honestly, my first reactions, reading the plotline and seeing the first trailer several months ago, were similar to Anne's. We had LOVED both Toy Storys, A Bug's Life, and Monsters INC; but Finding Nemo just looked kinda...lame. And Albert Brooks voicing the main character didn't help our first impressions any. But, it IS from Pixar, so last night we thought we'd give it a try.

I'm glad we did.

Like all of Pixar's movies, "Finding Nemo" is filled with non-human characters and settings that give the animators room to go wild. And they do. "Nemo" is the most colorful and staggeringly beautiful of the five Pixar movies to date, and both the realistically rendered underwater world and the cartoonish surface world come to life in a way not seen outside of a child's imagination.

The basic plot is this: Marlin is an adult widowed Clownfish, who is overly protective of his only son, Nemo. This is with good reason, because in the first scene of the movie, Marlin's wife and 399 other children are eaten by a barracuda of some kind. (Just so you can prepare the kids for THAT) We see some of the challenges of underwater fatherhood, which are remarkably similar to those of us dads who dwell on the surface. Soon, however, Nemo is missing, and it's up to Marlin to find his little son. Along the way, both father and son encounter casts of characters alternately threatening and amusing, and have encounters with most of the water dwellers that your children will be bugging you about later. A short list includes sharks, hammerhead sharks, sea turtles, octopus, starfish, manta rays, whales, jellyfish, anemones, and a joke about a sea cucumber that never gets told in its entirety.

My favorite by far of the new characters we meet is Dory, a blue fish voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, who has a short term memory loss that's the source of most of the comic relief in the movie. She's hilarious, and isn't quite stupid...she just can't remember things. It's funnier than it sounds.
The voice cast includes Albert Brooks as Marlin (this may be my favorite thing he's ever done), Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Brad Garrett, Allison Janney, Stephen Root, Vicki Lewis, and Geoffery Rush; and they're all excellent in their roles, as you'd expect from a Pixar release.

The animation, as I said earlier, is stunning, with highlights being a race through clouds of pink jellyfish and the incredible beauty of Marlin and Nemo's home neighborhood. There were times I forgot I was watching animation, and not some kind of documentary--that's how realistic many of the scenes are.

If you were holding off on watching "Finding Nemo," don't be as stubborn as my niece. Just because it's a "fish tale" doesn't mean it's not good. This is an excellent movie that deserves to be a priority on your summer movie list.