I heard several younger children crying at more than one point in the film. Yes, the excitement of "Finding Nemo" can get a bit intense. Chalk it up to a father's love, a friendly pelican and the magic of computer animation, through which all things are possible. It's a dangerous gambit, but no more risky than Marlin's mission, which seems to overlook the fact that, even if he and Dory get to where they're going in one piece, it's a long way from harbor to the tank where Nemo is being held.
Meanwhile, Nemo has befriended his fellow captives, a motley group of detainees from the pet shop, including the Moorish idol Gill (William Dafoe), a grotesquely scarred veteran of one too many escape attempts whose defeatism is given a momentary boost by the arrival of someone small - and naive - enough to aid in his plot to sabotage the tank's filter mechanism and escape out the window while the aquarium is being cleaned. She and Marlin become allies in the search for Nemo, a quest that takes them not only into the company of three sharks in unconvincing recovery from an addiction to fish as food (Barry Humphries, Eric Bana and Bruce Spence), but into a field of jellyfish and the East Australian Current, a fast-moving sea lane where they encounter Crush (director Andrew Stanton), an aimless surfer-dude sea turtle who points them in the direction of Sydney Harbor. Somehow, the blue tang can read she just can't remember what she has read from one minute to the next.
That's where Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) comes in. Understandably, Daddy is a little anxious about the one surviving egg, who grows into the titular Nemo (Alexander Gould), a sweet little swimmer with a bum fin who, in testing the limits of his father's stifling overprotectiveness, winds up in the net of a scuba diver en route to the aquarium of a dentist's office in Sydney.įortunately, a mask has fallen off the boat with the fishnapper's name and address written on it. Marlin, a clown fish (voice of Albert Brooks), is traumatized when his wife (Elizabeth Perkins) and 399 of her eggs become, well, sushi and caviar for a hungry neighbor. Set on a coral reef near Australia, the action opens with a bang - or rather a chomp - that raises the bar for act-one, scene-one tragedy. With its cast of damaged heroes and villains, Pixar Animation Studios' latest computer-generated adventure is a captivating and richly resonant aquatic fable, with characters whose gills and fins belie their deliciously human (that is, flawed) personalities. "Finding Nemo" sounds more like Neil LaBute than Walt Disney. Meanwhile, his neurotic, illiterate father is forced to enlist the aide of a beautiful stranger with short-term memory loss to decipher the only clue left at the crime scene, even while the pair narrowly averts such threats as a trio of predatory thugs foundering in a 12-step program.
I CAN imagine the story pitch: A motherless child with a stunted limb is abducted and held prisoner along with several other physically and emotionally scarred victims.