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Are you man enough to take your kids to see a
G rated movie - regardless of their or your
age? It is a definite treat! It centers
primarily around Father/Son pairings (Nemo and his
father Marlin, and Squirt and his father Crush) and
positive male mentors like Gil. Even the sharks do
their best to be good role models, though they are
recovering from some pretty strong addictions. It's
also a strong message to all parents to "let go"
and give you kids more freedom while continuing
sensible boundaries that aren't based on your
fears.. The fact that the voice talent is supurb,
the animation is the best, the characters of each
species of fish are honed to a tee, and the script
carries healthy positive messages. No beautiful
princess waiting for a rich prince, or monther/son
connection that makes you wonder if the kid had a
biological father. This is one of the best, if not
the best animated kids messages I can remember.
Grab the kids or grand kids or hitch a ride with
the neighbors and their kids and see this
movie! And, if you can't find some kids to go
with, there will be plenty of them in the audience.
Gordon Clay 0.3.0 G Rated [1:41]
The following is a 4-star review 5/30/03 by
Roger Ebert
"Finding Nemo" has all of the usual pleasures of
the Pixar animation style--the comedy and wackiness
of "Toy Story" or "Monsters Inc." or "A Bug's
Life." And it adds an unexpected beauty, a use of
color and form that makes it one of those rare
movies where I wanted to sit in the front row and
let the images wash out to the edges of my field of
vision. The movie takes place almost entirely under
the sea, in the world of colorful tropical
fish--the flora and fauna of a shallow warm-water
shelf not far from Australia. The use of color,
form and movement make the film a delight even
apart from its story.
There is a story, though, one of those Pixar
inventions that involves kids on the action level
while adults are amused because of the satire and
human (or fishy) comedy. The movie involves the
adventures of little Nemo, a clown fish born with
an undersized fin and an oversized curiosity. His
father, Marlin, worries obsessively over him,
because Nemo is all he has left: Nemo's mother and
all of her other eggs were lost to barracudas. When
Nemo goes off on his first day of school, Marlin
warns him to stay with the class and avoid the
dangers of the drop-off to deep water, but Nemo
forgets, and ends up as a captive in the salt-water
aquarium of a dentist in Sydney. Marlin swims off
bravely to find his missing boy, aided by Dory, a
blue tang with enormous eyes who he meets along the
way.
These characters are voiced by actors whose own
personal mannerisms are well known to us; I
recognized most of the voices, but even the
unidentified ones carried buried associations from
movie roles, and so somehow the fish take on
qualities of human personalities. Marlin, for
example, is played by Albert Brooks as an
overprotective, neurotic worrywart, and Dory is
Ellen DeGeneres as helpful, cheerful and
scatterbrained (she has a problem with short-term
memory).
The Pixar computer animators, led by
writer-director Andrew Stanton, create an undersea
world that is just a shade murky, as it should be;
we can't see as far or as sharply in sea water, and
so threats materialize more quickly, and everything
has a softness of focus. There is something
dreamlike about the visuals of "Finding Nemo,"
something that evokes the reverie of
scuba-diving.
The picture's great inspiration is to leave the
sea by transporting Nemo to that big tank in the
dentist's office. In it we meet other captives,
including the Moorish Idol fish Gill (voice by
Willem Dafoe), who are planning an escape. Now it
might seem to us that there is no possible way a
fish can escape from an aquarium in an office and
get out of the window and across the highway and
into the sea, but there is no accounting for the
ingenuity of these creatures, especially since they
have help from a conspirator on the outside--a
pelican with the voice of Geoffrey Rush.
It may occur to you that many pelicans make a
living by eating fish, not rescuing them, but some
of the characters in this movie have evolved
admirably into vegetarians. As Marlin and Dory
conduct their odyssey, for example, they encounter
three carnivores who have formed a chapter of
Fish-Eaters Anonymous, and chant slogans to remind
them that they abstain from fin-based meals.
The first scenes in "Finding Nemo" are a little
unsettling, as we realize the movie is going to be
about fish, not people (or people-based characters
like toys and monsters). But of course animation
has long since learned to enlist all other species
in the human race, and to care about fish quickly
becomes as easy as caring about mice or ducks or
Bambi.
When I review a movie like "Finding Nemo," I am
aware that most members of its primary audience do
not read reviews. Their parents do, and to them and
adults who do not have children as an excuse, I can
say that "Finding Nemo" is a pleasure for
grown-ups. There are jokes we get that the kids
don't, and the complexity of Albert Brooks'
neuroses, and that enormous canvas filled with
creatures that have some of the same hypnotic
beauty as--well, fish in an aquarium. They may
appreciate another novelty: This time the dad is
the hero of the story, although in most animation
it is almost always the mother.
Source: www.suntimes.com/cgi-bin/print.cgi
Also www.kids-in-mind.com/f/findingnemo.htm
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