The film is named for the son, but the titular quest is the father’s. Finding Nemo dispenses with surrogate relationships: It’s a literal father-son story transparently set amid the aspirations and anxieties of American suburbia and helicopter parenthood, though transposed to an undersea world of anthropomorphic fish. were for a time the grown-ups in Boo’s world (if less surrogate parents than avuncular figures in a sort of Two Monsters and a Baby scenario).
The Toy Story movies were about parental anxieties (or at least Toy Story 2 was) and Mike and especially Sully in Monsters, Inc. What makes Nemo different is that these scenes are depicted not from the child’s point of view, but from the father’s.įinding Nemo solidifies the orientation of previous Pixar films as family films aimed at parents. The other thing linking Finding Nemo to Bambi and The Lion King, of course, is not one but two of the most traumatic parental separation/loss scenes in all of family cinema. … The film is named for the son, but the titular quest is the father’s. (Contrast DreamWorks’ Shark Tale, which is full of clever submarine conceits (e.g., the Whale Wash), but is too wedded to the surface world to honor the wonder of the ocean.)įinding Nemo solidifies the orientation of previous Pixar films as family films aimed at parents. Cartoony character design notwithstanding, Finding Nemo has a love for the natural world that’s a credit to the tradition of Bambi and The Lion King.
Ray’s tour of the coral reef - one of the most eye-popping, kaleidoscopically colorful sequences in all of animation, from the flashing reflections of his own spotted back on the surface just above him to the heightened naturalism of the flora and fauna (the Spanish dancer sea slug is a favorite). Look closely at the top of the little pink octopus with one slightly shorter tentacle: Her mantle is slightly transparent. Watching Nemo in 3-D on the big screen with my kids, I was captivated by all sorts of details that don’t stand out the same way on the small screen: the varying degrees of transparency and translucence of fishy fins the articulation of the tiny suction cups on the underside of Peach the starfish in the dentist’s fish tank. Of later films, perhaps only Cars and Stanton’s own Wall-E are so dependent on texture, depth and the ambient quality of atmosphere itself - or, in the case of Nemo, of water. No previous computer-animated film was so specific to this medium. Finding Nemo couldn’t be anything other than computer animation, because its essence is inseparable from the splendor of its undersea world, realized in quasi-photographic grandeur and richness unmatched by the noblest attempts of hand-drawn animation (Disney’s “Arab Dance” fish in Fantasia’s “Nutcracker Suite” sequence The Little Mermaid even Miyazaki’s Ponyo).
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