… 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).

Film finding nemo