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Director: Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich (co-director)
Writers: Andrew Stanton, Bob Peterson, David Reynolds
Cast: Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Alexander Gould, Willem Dafoe, Brad Garrett, Allison Janney, Austin Pendleton, Stephen Root, Vicki Lewis, Joe Ranft, Geoffrey Rush, Andrew Stanton, Elizabeth Perkins, Nicholas Bird, John Ratzenberger
Runtime: 100 mins.
2003
Finding Nemo is Pixar's second stone cold masterpiece, and the starkest departure from their previous film is a visual one. I mentioned in my Monsters, Inc. review that although the monsters looked great, the characters spent most of the movie running around corporate hallways that lacked any visual pizzazz. Almost as if Pixar heard that very complaint and determined to never again allow their films to be accused of visual mediocrity, Finding Nemo is one of the most epic, expansive, gorgeous masterworks of production design ever created by computer animation. The visual landscape is at times populated by Pixar's signature visual gags, like a group of fish popping out of a doting mother fish's mouth, but for a far larger portion of the runtime the picture is dedicated to images that flirt with the sublime. The ocean is vast and full of darkness, terror, wonder, perversion. Finding Nemo captures all of this while still somehow maintaining a G rating.
The story follows overprotective clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) who must cross vast expanses of ocean in search of his son Nemo (Alexander Gould), who was taken by scuba divers and imprisoned in a dentist office's glass tank. Along the way Marlin meets Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), a forgetful blue regal tang, and together they encounter all sorts of friendly help and unspeakable hindrance.
