Pixar Animation Studios is at a place now
that Disney wishes it could get back to. They have released
5 films and each one has been bigger and better than the last.
Not many studios can boast this.
It's no secret that the Pixar / Disney relationship
is coming to a close. Pixar has fulfilled its contract and is
now free to release their own films on their own terms. This
leaves Disney in the unfamiliar territory of not really having
any decent prospects for their animation department. Their solution
seems to be to abandon traditional animation and gear up to
begin producing their own 3D films.
The lesson that seems to have escaped the
Disney executives is that it isn't the animation technique that
makes Pixar so good; it's the storytelling. Pixar films would
work even if they were little more than frames of napkin illustrations.
Finding Nemo, the latest Pixar epic is certainly
technically superior to anything the studio has produced to
date. The quality of 3D animation that creates the underwater
world is out-and-out astonishing and the images are so beautiful
that one could simply switch off the sounds and watch in awe.
Given that, it's easy to understand why Disney
now feels that it must abandon traditional animation. But the
key is that for as good a Finding Nemo looks, the story and
characters are even better.
The film opens with a surprisingly brutal
tragedy. Animated films are no strangers to horrible events,
but they usually aren't so explicitely shown. The animators,
however, do an amazing job of creating a truly scary scene without
being gratuitous. Marlin, a tiny clown fish voiced by Albert
Brooks and his family are attacked by a hungry barracuda. When
it's all over, the only survivors are Marlin and a tiny, damaged
egg.
We flash forward and find Marlin trying to
raise his only son, Nemo (Alexander Gould). The barracuda attack
has left Marlin in a perpetual state of neurosis (a condition
Albert Brooks excells at conveying) and highly over-protective
of his son. Nemo is about to begin his first day of school and
Marlin is terrified.
Marlin's worst fears are realized when a class
field trip results in Nemo being kidnapped by a human scuba
diver. Marlin frantically chases after the human boat, but he
just can't keep up. Nemo is gone. But the diver drops his goggles
and with little else to go on, Marlin follows the clue to the
ocean floor.
His luck changes for the better (though it
takes him some time to realize this) when he quite literally
runs into a little blue fish named Dory (Ellen DeGeneres). Dory
suffers from the unfortunate condition of short-term memory
loss, causing her to forget what she's doing almost as soon
as she starts doing it. Dory, however, has the unexpected and
inexplicable ability to read human and is able to read the address
label on the diver's goggles (she also can speak whale, in what
has to be one of the funniest scenes ever rendered onto film).
Thus, Dory and Marlin set off to find this
diver in Syndey, Australia.
Nemo, meanwhile, has been placed into an aquarium
where he is to eventually become a gift to a little girl with
a nasty habit of accidentally killing her pet fish. The aquarium
is filled with a variety of other tropical fish and each of
them seem to have gone just a bit crazy during their captivity.
For instance, one fish, Deb (Vicki Lewis) is conviced that she
has a twin sister, Flo. In reality, Flo is simply Deb's reflection
in the glass. Another fish, Bubbles (Stephen Root), is obsessed
with the bubbles that come out of a treasure chest ornament
in the tank. The reason I bring this up is because I have owned
several fish tanks and I've often wondered just what aquarium
life must do to a fish.
This is Pixar's gift. They take ideas that
we have all wondered about, such as toys coming to life, monsters
under the bed, or fish plotting their escape from the tank like
a twisted version of Hogan's Heroes, and they bring those ideas
to insanely comical reality.
The leader in the fish tank is Gill (Willem
Defoe) and he has a plan for escape that is a brilliant as it
is short-sighted. The plan is to break the tank's filtration
system, forcing the humans to take the fish out and clean the
tank. Once out of the tank, they plan to roll their little plastic
baggies out the window and into the ocean. There are obvious
questions that a plan such as this raises, but the fish never
think to ask them -- until it's too late.
The thing that Pixar has mastered better than
anyone else in the business is crafting stories that are undeniably
appropriate for the kids, but also hugely entertaining for the
adults. It isn't just that the adult jokes are amusing -- they
are flat-out wickedly funny, and yet never inappropriate for
the kids. It's a rare gift and a talent that places Pixar at
the top of the pile when it comes to family films.
Finding Nemo makes for homerun number 5 for
the studio. They have two new films coming up, The Incredibles
and Cars and based on their record, I, for one, can't wait.
