Disney
Pixar's fifth feature film dazzles us with brilliantly
colored and intricately detailed panoramic views
of the coral gardens of the Great Barrier Reef,
and we get to meet a number of engaging and memorable
characters, in particular the anxiously overprotective
clownfish father Marlin (Albert Brooks) who must
overcome his own timidity in order to rescue
his son Nemo, the sweetly addlepated blue tang
Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) who befriends Marlin and
inadvertently complicates his quest with her
memory-loss confusions, the laid-back surfer-dude
sea turtle Crush (Andrew Stanton) who teaches
Marlin that fathers need to give their sons a
chance to take risks, the scarred but unbroken
Moorish idol Gill (Willem Dafoe) who serves as
Nemo's surrogate father and instructor in jailbreak
techniques when he's imprisoned in a dentist's
aquarium, and the toothy great white Bruce (Barry
Humphries), the leader of a trio of sharks who
have forsworn their addiction to fish flesh in
an underwater parody of Alcoholics Anonymous,
but unfortunately FINDING NEMO also features
the fart-and-burp "humor" now obligatory in all
Hollywood films, not to mention a tired resurrection
of the least original dentist jokes imaginable,
jokes that were already hopelessly stale and
clichéd fifty years ago, and then there's a final
test of Nemo's courage that is so artificially
contrived and extraneous to the main line of
the plot that it must have been impulsively tacked
on as an afterthought, and perhaps the most regrettable
shortcoming of all is the circumspect understatement
of tragic sentiment, a tactic that
diminishes the dramatic force of the entire film,
for if Coral, the mother clownfish, had been
allowed to sing just one tender lullaby to Nemo
and her other eggs before she gets munched, then
everything that follows would have been charged
with a greater emotional urgency, but of course
the boys at the Disney Pixar studio are much
too hip, cool, and sophisticated to do anything
that might appear overly maudlin, anything that
might actually move little kids to sob with grief
the way whole audiences did sixty years ago when
they saw BAMBI.
 
Finding Nemo
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