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FINDING NEMO / Malcontent's Mark: B+
May 30, 2003
Featuring the voices of:
Marlin: Albert Brooks
Dory: Ellen DeGeneres
Gill: Willem Dafoe
Pelican: Geoffrey Rush
Written and directed by Andrew Stanton.
Rated G
I’ve also had an odd fascination
with oceans. I grew up on the Great Lakes, but many nights I would lie awake
imagining how a little jaunt up the St. Lawrence River from Lake Ontario would
lead to the Atlantic Ocean. And now, all grown up and living on my own, I can
say that Puget Sound is practically my backyard.
Understandably, this fascination with the ocean also includes its myriad
sea-life. You could say I’m fond of fish - I had an aquarium during most of my
college years, fishing has always been one of my favorite pastimes, and I
consider the grilled salmon one of the finer choices on the menu. I’ve also
loved movies involving sea life; I practically wet myself watching seafaring
spectacles like Jaws and The Perfect Storm.
So it may come as a surprise that the new Pixar film, a fish story called
Finding Nemo left me a little cold.
The story unfolds on warm-water shelf along
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef where we meet infant clownfish Nemo and his
doting parents. As typical in a Disney film, there is a horrifying death in the
family. And soon after the death, there is a kidnapping, which sets in motion
the perilous adventure of the father clownfish trying to retrieve his son. It
doesn’t sound like kid stuff on paper, but the animation is bright and colorful,
and the action zips along at a pace that keeps the disturbing subtext safely
submerged beneath the colorful palette.
Of course, I marveled at the cutting edge animation of Finding Nemo -
that’s not where the movie left me cold. Pixar has always been a reliable
powerhouse of computer animation, always innovative and for the most part,
consistently crowd-pleasing. Their Toy Story clearly showed computer
animation as the sublimely perfect medium for depicting the plastic world of
toys. And in Nemo, the animation remains a marvel. It’s been said that
water is the most difficult natural substance to render in animation, but Pixar
successfully evokes a convincing underwater environment that is slightly murky,
as it should be. The score provides majesty to the ocean images; the music,
deep and sonorous with plucks from a harp, is quite appropriate for the
underwater odyssey.
The filmmakers infuse the ocean adventure with story elements that border on the
sublime. We learn that seagulls are actually saying “Mine!” each time they
squawk, their little brains focused only on food. And at one point, the heroes
are trapped in the body of a whale, thus continuing the narrative device from
Pinocchio.
And fortunately for the filmmakers, voice characterization for animation has
somehow become de rigueur for Hollywood’s upper echelons. So Finding Nemo
is fortified with the voice talents of Geoffrey Rush, as a pelican, Willem Dafoe
as a Moorish Idol fish named Gill, and Albert Brooks as the father clownfish,
Marlin. All three acting talents anthropomorphize their respective
critters with playful wit and tender pathos.
But the most transcendent voice work belongs to Barry Humphries, also known as
Dame Edna, voicing Bruce the shark (note the Jaws reference). Have I
already told you about my fascination with sharks? Imagine my glee when Marlin
bumps into Bruce in the middle of a Fish-Eaters Anonymous group. The group,
including a hammerhead and a bull shark, chants slogans about abstaining from
their carnivorous ways. There’s a witty moment when there’s a scuffle among the
sharks and a tendril of blood slips up Bruce’s nostril, his pupils dilate
like the junkies in Requiem for a Dream. He instinctively tries to
devour Marlin and company and gives chase through a sunken WWII submarine.
As Pixar journeys forth from their Toy Story classics, into the worlds of
bugs in 1998’s A Bug’s Life and now sea life in Finding Nemo, they
are beginning to show the limitations of their animation. Through the years,
they wisely have never attempted to show humans or trees with any authenticity.
Go back to first Toy Story, and you’ll see how the trees and humans could
have also been manufactured by Mattel. Although Finding Nemo’s
life on the coral reef is vivid and bursting with color, there’s a distinct lack
of the sea’s flitting beauty. I longed for the simple majesty of the live-action
animal epics Winged Migration and Microcosmos.
And too many of Nemo’s
characters resemble saccharine cutesy Pokemon-type characters, especially
the young octopi - a near exact imitation of that repellent pink Pokemon
known as “Jigglypuff.” And after being kidnapped, Nemo is “imprisoned” in the
aquarium where he meets up with an assortment of plucky, but forgettable
characters. If you can recite the names of the aquarium gang, other than
Dafoe’s Gill, then you were able be pay much closer attention than I could.
And if you step back and take closer look at the story, you’ll see that it’s
only half full. The eye-popping animation works to distract you from the simple
fact that Finding Nemo’s story is actually rather flat and artificially
sentimental. Marlin is accompanied by a scatterbrained blue tang named Dory,
voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, who constantly misdirects him. I often found
DeGeneres’ Memento-style memory loss problem a groan-inducing affair that
mostly just worked to introduce new obstacles in poor Marlin’s quest for his
son. Sure, DeGeneres gets in some pretty funny lines, like murmuring “sea
monkeys stole my money” while talking in her sleep, but for the most part, her
character’s purpose is to unforgivably impede Marlin’s progress.
And this annoying Nemo ingredient is almost forgivable compared to
the sea turtles interlude. Dory and Marlin unfortunately befriend a sea turtle
named Crush, voiced by Nemo’s director Andrew Stanton. His surfer dude
schtick wears thin within seconds. How many times have we heard surfer-speak
like, “We were like ‘Woah!’ and you were like ‘Woah!’ and I was like ‘Woah!’”?
Perhaps I’m too swept up in realistically rendered ocean tales to review
Finding Nemo fairly. I can easily say that Pixar still continues to
raise the bar for what computer animation can do. But judging from Finding
Nemo and 2001’s Monster, Inc., Pixar still has a long way to go to
catch up to the sheer brilliance of DreamWorks’ Shrek.
Copyright (c) 2003
Bryan Stumpf.
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