Title: Finding Nemo

Date Viewed: 6/1

Details:

Voice talents: Albert Brooks (Marlin, a clownfish)

Ellen DeGeneres (Dory, a blue tang)

Alexander Gould (Nemo, a clownfish)

Willem Dafoe (Gill, an angelfish)

Geoffrey Rush (Nigel, a pelican)

Andrew Stanton (Crush, a sea turtle)

Barry Humphries (Bruce, a shark)

Bill Hunter (Dentist, a human)

John Ratzenberger (Fish School, a manta ray)

Directed by: Andrew Stanton & Lee Unkric

Score: +

The Review: Pixar and Disney have another hit on their hands, in the same class as Toy Story and Monsters Inc. Set off the Australian coast and in the harbor near Sydney, this is the quest of a father for his lost son -- a near-mythological adventure that bounds over great distances, surmounts difficult and dangerous obstacles, but accretes companions and friends along the way. Pervaded by a gentle sense of humor, and packed with quick visual jokes -- well worth a second viewing -- and the occasionally sophomoric aquatic analog of youthful toilet humor. And there are times the humor goes absolutely manic: look for the scene in the dentist's office.

Excellent and fascinating characterization abound. Ellen DeGeneres voices Dory (who is not a dory, but a blue tang), afflicted with a piscean variant of Korsakoff's syndrome (a neurological disorder, a form of anterograde amnesia in which new memories cannot be laid down permanently); this offers some humor, some poignancy, some sense of tragedy -- but it works and proves an excellent foil to Albert Brooks' Marlin (not a marlin, but a clownfish who cannot tell a joke). Barry Humphries voices Bruce, a shark who has created a three-step program (I guess sharks cannot count to seven, plus-or-minus two) around the theme "fish are our friends, not food," but always looks on the brink of a psychological relapse. Andrew Stanton voices Crush, a 150-year old sea turtle who sounds more like a laid-back California surfer dude than a migratory native of the South Pacific. Then there are the gulls, almost throw-away characters perhaps for most viewers, but my favorite here: mindless, menacing and focused on only one thing ("mine; mine; mine"), they remind me of the evil penguin in the Wallace & Gromit short claymation feature The Wrong Trousers (1995).

Again, the end credits offer rewards for those who wait: more visual jokes, some clever animation, and (a Pixar standard feature) a few characters that seem to have wandered in from another universe.

Although I might quibble with the visualization of the East Australian Current, the biology seems dead on (I really liked Ratzenberger's manta ray as teacher, chanting taxonomic trees and binomial nomenclature) and offers anatomically correct renderings (at least the whale; think about it afterward). And yes, a tropical reef really is both that brilliant and variegated in color, although perhaps a bit muted at depth. The animation of water, the water surface, the effects of surface motion and ripples on underwater lighting -- all this was excellent. Rendering moving water, and associated visual effects, has proven to be a very difficult modeling and computational task, and it's good to see it done well.

We had the opportunity to see Finding Nemo in digital projection: it was a bright, solid, rock-steady image, carefully focused -- even though I could see pixels on occasion, when things were in motion this was never noticeable. The care taken by the theatre to keep the system in alignment meant the image quality was superb. So at least for the time being, an advertised DLP version would seem to be a guarantee of high quality images.

(12-Jun-03)

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