Most of the reviews I've read of Finding Nemo have focused on the computer-generated animation. That's understandable--if Finding Nemo isn't the most brilliantly animated movie ever, as some have claimed, it's certainly one of the most visually complex films ever committed to celluloid. Every frame is packed with colorful detail and playful in-jokes, most of which I missed.
Why? Because, silly person that I am, I was paying attention to the story and the dialogue.
I feel the same way about animated motion pictures as I do about live-action flicks: you can throw as much CGI at me as you want to, but you damn well better tell me a story, too--and make it a good one. The folks at Pixar understand this. Their previous efforts (the Toy Story movies, A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc.) all had fabulous animation, but it was the quality of the storytelling that held my attention; I didn't even notice the look and feel of Toy Story until about halfway through it because I was so enjoying the detailed characterizations and and witty dialogue.
To be sure, Pixar has developed a recognizable, if highly successful and flexible, formula: Establish a setting and characters (a child's bedroom full of toys, an ant colony, an ocean community); throw in an event that causes one or more of the main characters to go on a quest; have said characters meet colorful (in the case of Finding Nemo, literally so) friends/foes along the way; stress the importance of the love of friends and/or family; repeat as necessary.
The formula varies slightly from film to film, of course. In Nemo, tragedy strikes Disney-style in the first few minutes, as Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks, though he sounds remarkably like Tom Hanks to these ears), a clown fish, loses his wife and most of their eggs to a barracuda, making him afraid of the very ocean around him and overprotective of his one remaining child, Nemo (Alexander Gould). Marlin's smothering attention to Nemo, who also has an underdeveloped right front fin, makes the younger clown fish rebel, much to father and son's mutual regret: Nemo swims up to a boat and is promtly scooped up by a scoobadiver, who takes the captured little fishy back to the aquarium in his office in Sydney.
The movie thus splits into two stories: Nemo's adventures in the fish tank with other "inmates" (voiced by the likes of Allison Janney, Brad Garrett and, most memorably, Willem Dafoe as an escape-minded angelfish); and Marlin's quest to find and save his son. The latter is the more involved of the two, with Marlin meeting all sorts of fish along the long trip to Sydney, like Bruce (Barry Humphries), a shark who's sworn off of eating fish; Crush (voiced by co-director Andrew Stanton), an accomodating sea turtle; and Nigel (Geoffrey Rush), a friendly pelican.
Best and funniest of all, though, is Dory (Ellen DeGeneres, in a bouncy vocal performance that would be worthy of Best Supporting Actress consideration if the Academy considered voice acting as acting, period), a Royal Blue Tang (yes, I said "Tang"--stop giggling now) who suffers from short-term memory loss and perpetual curiousity that is both help (gathering information to help Marlin rescue Nemo) and hindrance (damn near getting both of them killed numerous times).
Love of newfound friends (though not romantic love, dancing around a cliche live-action movies would be better off dropping as well), accepting responsibility for actions, succeeding in spite of substantial handicaps and against daunting odds--empowering themes that Pixar touches on regularly, enriching their characters and giving their adventures a surprising degree of emotional heft (when I wasn't laughing, I was tearing up).
Add levels of humor aimed at adults and children with out excluding or condescending to either audience, and what you wind up with is a movie that touches, amuses, entertains and emotionally satisfies like far too few movies do.
Oh...and Finding Nemo looks really pretty, too.
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