Quality family entertainment is what the outstanding animation Finding Nemo delivers. As ever with a glistening new offering from Pixar Animation, the main event is preceded by a relatively simple short film: dredged up, or possibly reconstructed, from Pixar’s past. The effect is clearly to impress upon us the filmmakers’ sense of their own breathtaking contemporary sophistication with a little instant, celebratory ancestor-worship.
Self-congratulation this may be, but it’s well deserved and how very pleasurable to see again the traditional little sequence that precedes even the short: the hopping angle-poise lamp whose final direct stare at the viewer always causes a twinge. It’s a signature of quality.
Like Monsters Inc and the Toy Stories, Finding Nemo is set in a vivid, surreal secret world — right under the noses of us humans, but we don’t know it’s there. As ever, there are wacky creatures of all shapes and sizes: a ragtag platoon of amiable attitudes and comedy voices. This time they’re fish. They live in the measureless depths of the ocean off the Australian coast in an extraordinary CGI world of hyperreal detail and extraterrestrial light — where is that light coming from?
Everything is as dazzling as you might expect. Nemo is a little fish kid whose overprotective dad, Marlin, is perfectly voiced by Albert Brooks, that prince of good-natured anxiety. He is excessively concerned about his son because Nemo’s mother and all his siblings were wiped out over some years before by a villainous shark. So Marlin, the adorable widower whom you long to protect just as he cossets his boy, takes Nemo to his first day at school, and is appalled to learn that they are going on a science trip to the ”drop-off”: the place where their enclosed little Coral Reef bio-habitat opens on to the blue abyss of the ocean.
Defiantly Nemo swims out to a boat just to rebel against his dad and is immediately kidnapped by a frogman whose looming humanness is more terrifying than any sea-beast. This turns out to be a Sydney dentist who has snaffled poor little Nemo for the tropical fish tank in his consulting room. So Marlin must find his boy.
On his quest, he meets reliably zany characters. Bruce the Shark, voiced by Barry Humphries, is a Cowardly Lion for the 21st century. Bruce goes to a 12-step shark support group for his aggression issues with a shame-faced crowd of barracuda and together they chant the mantra: ”Fish are friends not food!” Yet, a snarling exception is made for hoity-toity dolphins, whom they still hate.
Love interest, of the most bizarre sort, is provided by Dory, the fish with the short-term memory problem, which gives Ellen DeGeneres her best role in years. Dory is away with the fairies — or rather away with the plankton — and her weirdness finds its apex with the best gag in the film.
It’s all tremendously entertaining stuff, with oodles of wonderful detail and superb direction by Andrew Stanton and spacey undersea music by Thomas Newman of Six Feet Under fame. I have to confess, however, that I found it appreciably less exotic and somehow less ambitious than previous Pixar outings. Talking fish are less way out than talking toys aware of their own commercial-retail status, or talking monsters running on the fuel of kids’ nightmare-haunted screams.
There’s one very interesting thing about Finding Nemo: its Australian setting with Australian actors like Humphries, Geoffrey Rush and Eric Bana. One fish huffs: ”Humans! They think they know everything! Probably Americans.” Can this sort of sentiment really be good box office? I fear for George W Bush’s poll ratings. — Â