Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Finding Nemo

Movie Guru Rating:

Bad Karma (2 out of 5)

Comment
on this review

Pixar shoots for mediocrity with its latest offering and succeeds

by Adrienne Martini

Perhaps the best thing about the latest Pixar project Finding Nemo is that Randy Newman didn't pen one of his hyperbolically chummy little ditties for it. A Newman tune would have been the final insult, the one that finally made me flee the theater looking for a hit of insulin. While I'm not diabetic, I did start to feel myself slipping into a little sucrose coma by the time the credits started to unspool.

Such mawkish sweetness isn't usually what animation giant Pixar is known for. Most of its projects are refreshing in their willingness to entertain both adults and kiddies with their visual flair and snappy pacing. Both Toy Story and A Bug's Life redefined what computer animation could do, and other studios have been trying to catch up with such lackluster entries as Shrek and Antz. Pixar's Monsters, Inc. is a textbook example of how movie-length cartoons should work. With the sole exception of the Randy Newman closing tune, Monsters is fresh and inventive—the visual equivalent of a glass of unsweetened iced tea after mowing the lawn in July—and a perfect antidote to the usual sentimental slop that gets offered up as kid's fare.

Which may be what makes Nemo such a disappointment. Compared to the vast dull sea in which it swims, Nemo is a twinkling jewel full of gee-whiz animation work and twinkly, nuanced characters. But when cast against the rest of the Pixar cannon, Nemo fades, snared in its own soppy story.

In the opening few minutes, we meet Marlin, a mensch of a clown fish, and Coral, his darling wife. During their lovely little love dance in their new home, we learn that they have 400 eggs just waiting to hatch down in the rec room. Suddenly, Coral and the multitudinous offspring are eaten. One tiny little egg survives (Nemo, naturally) and Marlin, voiced by Albert Brooks, takes it under his overprotective fin. Fast-forward a bit to Nemo's first day of school. Marlin doesn't want him to go and nearly smothers Nemo with his anxiety.

(A brief aside: why must all adult makers of kid's films insist on terrifying children by using the separated-from-parent plot device? Truly, the only thing more unnerving to most kids are clowns. And the unholy intersection of both means that I'll never be able to sit through Dumbo again, no matter how old and feeble I become.)

Nemo, in a peer-pressure-induced event, gets himself netted by a human, who takes the tyke to his office fishtank. And so the rest of the plot unreels, with Marlin looking for Nemo and Nemo trying to get back to the sea. I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say that it all ends happily and Important Life Lessons are learned.

What's most aggravating is that it takes so bloomin' long to get through the predictable plot. Sure, it looks wonderful, and these inventive computer animators have finally mastered water, one of the most difficult environments to render. But once you get past the stunning visuals, there's really not much left. Marlin and Nemo are straight from central casting and never develop in any unexpected ways. Dory, the short-term-memory-impaired blue tang voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, seems lifted from Memento and sanitized. Sure, she's a good foil for the pessimistic Marlin, but jokes built around her inability to remember things wear thin pretty quickly. Even the 4-year-old sitting next to me was a little put out after the umpteenth repetition of the same "I've forgotten!" trope.

One of Nemo's few redeeming qualities is its ancillary characters, like the 12-stepping sharks, the quirky tank dwellers, and, my personal fave, the fish-killing human Darla. Here is where you can see glimmers of what usually makes Pixar so much fun—and so much more than a convenient merchandising tie-in. But if you stripped these quirky little guys and gals out of the film, you really wouldn't have much left that could make any mark on your own short-term memory. Unless, of course, Randy Newman decided to write a song about it. That would make this vaguely pleasant and ultimately forgettable film into a deeply regrettable mistake.