High on the movie's list of accomplishments is its creation of an undersea wonderland whose opalescent colors and shifting light reflect the enchanted aura of dreamy aquatic photography. Whether the setting is a fish tank or an ocean current, the movie successfully sustains a watery ambience, not an easy thing to do given water's semitransparency.
Finding Nemo doesn't pretend that its undersea environment is a happier alternative to the world above. Under its comforting narrative arc, it presents a stark vision of the sea world as a treacherous jungle that, for all its beauty and excitement, is an extremely dangerous place to live. The movie jumps right into the darker side of life in a scene in which Marlin and his wife, Coral (Elizabeth Perkins), marvel at the more than 400 eggs that are about to yield a brood of children, only to have their future snatched away with the unwelcome appearance of a barracuda. In one furious snap, the intruder devours Coral and all but one of the eggs, leaving only Marlin and the single egg that becomes Nemo.
Once Nemo has landed in the aquarium, the story cuts back and forth between the father, desperately searching for his son, and Nemo making friends with his tankmates and plotting an improbable escape. The tank's unofficial leader, Gill (Willem Dafoe), is a black-and-white-striped Moorish idol, who like Nemo is a former ocean dweller longing to return to the sea.
The escape plan becomes a race against time once Nemo learns he is to be given as a present to the dentist's 8-year-old niece, Darla, a savage little monster who has been known to take a baggie containing a fish and shake it violently. Darla's appearances are accompanied by snippets of the shrieking murder music from Psycho.
Visual imagination and sophisticated wit raise Finding Nemo to a level just below the peaks of Pixar's Toy Story movies and Monsters, Inc, which were created by many of the same hands. As in the earlier Pixar movies, the animation achieves an astonishing synergy of voice, computer-animated image and dialogue. Facial expressions match vocal inflections with a precision that lends even the minor characters an almost surreal clarity.
The humor bubbling through Finding Nemo is so fresh, sure of itself and devoid of the cutesy, saccharine condescension that drips through so many family comedies that you have to wonder what it is about the Pixar technology that inspires the creators to be so endlessly inventive. The capacity of computer-animation to evoke a three-dimensional sense of detail obviously has something to do with it. But the enterprise still wouldn't amount to much without the formidable storytelling talents driving it.
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