Finding Nemo

365 Films

Entry #136

Finding Nemo (2003)

Directed by Andrew Stanton

One of my most distinct memories of Finding Nemo isn’t from the actual film itself but rather Roger Ebert’s unsurprisingly glowing appraisal of it.  In his review, he goes on at great length about he wanted to sit as close as he possibly could to the screen just to absorb the colors and the textures of the animation.  I had never heard anybody so eloquently describe a cartoon in such a way.  Then watching the film, I immediately grasped on to what he was seeing and experienced it in the exact same way.  In Nemo, the Pixar animators did something truly remarkable with the characters and environments in that they were able to blend the outlandish designs of the cartoon world with the radiant wonders of the real world.  The oceanic landscapes conjured up in Finding Nemo don’t look anything like the real world but rather we wish the real world looked more like it.  The best way to describe the advancement in animation that this film marked is to compare it to the previous film, Monsters, Inc.  In that film, while it is consistently beautiful, the truly eye popping sequence occurs late in the game when we venture into the door storage facility.  The sight almost becomes too much to take in and makes our eyeballs seem weak and feeble.  What I’d say about Finding Nemo is, that kind of eyeball deficiency occurs about every five minutes.  Each new sequence or transitional cut brings with it an image that makes one’s jaw drop to the floor.  Whether it is the fish tank in the dentist’s office or the quietly menacing clouds of jellyfish, the film seems to be reinventing animation grammar as it goes along.  Now all of that would be supremely meaningless without an actual movie underneath to support all of it.  If anybody else can come up with another film aimed at children with the Disney logo attached to it where the over-arching theme is that of accepting the random chaos of the universe, I would be mighty impressed.   In the meantime, we have Finding Nemo, a moving testament to the perils preciousness of parenthood and a rousing adventure to boot   One last thing, if we ever get around to awarding voice acting or making a special category for it, Ellen DeGeneres and Albert Brooks certainly deserve some sort of compensatory award for their efforts here.