Finding Nemo
January 2004 Reviewed by: Josh Barber Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

As Disney proper continues to corner the market on sappy, saccharine "family" fare that takes aim at the youngest common denominator, it seems increasingly that it relies on Pixar Animation Studios to produce anything of substance. Finding Nemo is the kind of film the House of Mouse used to make, filled with messages for the adults in the audience as well as the kids.

Marlin is a clownfish who has just moved, with his wife Coral, into the new home where the pair plan to raise their 400 children, currently a bundle of eggs in the back of a cave. Tragedy strikes, decimating the family and leaving Marlin to raise his son Nemo, the sole survivor, on his own. As happens so often these days, Marlin becomes overreactive and paranoid about Nemo’s safety, stifling his son's freedom in exchange for a measure of perceived security. When a deep-sea diver captures Nemo, Marlin and his new friend Dory must brave the dangers of the ocean to find him.

The twin worlds of Finding Nemo's narrative -- the ocean and a fish tank -- are psychological stand-ins for the perceptions of the protagonists: Parental Marlin sees the murky infinity of the world that could strike at his child, while young Nemo is confined to the claustrophobia of his father's care. Both are rendered beautifully by Pixar, who come the closest yet to realistically recreating water in animated form. That the film opens with a story of violence in suburbia gives great credit to the bravery of Pixar, as does the fact that there's no real villain in the piece, just the flaws of a chaotically constructed world. Marlin, Dory, Nemo and their friends are not threatened by outside evil, but by the minor anxious fears that plague our own minds.

Lately, Albert Brooks seems better suited to voicing cartoons than to live-action comedy. He makes Marlin almost into a Woody Allen-level neurotic, and his manic shrieking borders on the absurd. He has great chemistry with Ellen DeGeneres, which is a testament to Pixar's "story first, style second" approach -- neither actor probably read any lines with the other present, so the fact that their piecemeal performances came together this wonderfully is the work, mainly, of the Andrew Stanton script.

Presented in a beautiful two-disc set, Finding Nemo is certainly one of the best-looking discs released all year and the best-looking animated film yet. The two discs contain the widescreen and full-screen versions of the film separately. This allows for stunning picture quality. On DVD, Finding Nemo is crisp, colorful, and supremely detailed. The oranges of Nemo and Marlin, which could have been prone to bleeding, are sharp, even allowing us to see individual scales in some shots. Everything in this digital re-creation of the Great Barrier Reef is amazing, from the creeping decay of rust on a submarine to the plated growth of a turtle's shell.

The sound has been the subject of much praise, particularly in one glass-rattling (or is that tapping?) scene. The dynamic sound design is very good, again displaying that for all practical purposes, there is no appreciable difference between Dolby Digital and DTS. The burbling undersea sounds flow around the listener, and the sound design is well planned, but the dialogue is surprisingly quiet. On my equipment, it seemed slightly muted, which was a minor disappointment.

Each disc has its own special features. In a clever move, each feature has its running time listed on the main menu, which is an excellent idea that I hope other films will pick up. On both discs, a fish icon allows you to strip away the menus and view the aquatic backgrounds by themselves.

Disc 1 offers "A Plunge into the Filmmaker's World," a series of extras aimed more at adult cinephiles than their drooling progeny. The documentary "Making Nemo" is an in-depth look at the creation of the film that offers unprecedented access: The documentarians followed the development of the film from the very first day and provide many wonderfully informative tidbits. There is also a "Visual Commentary" that inserts seven rough deleted scenes into the film's storyline, each introduced by the directing and writing teams. The disc is rounded out with four humongous art galleries and seven "Virtual Aquariums."

Disc 2, the "family" disc (in that it has the full-screen edition of the film), offers a reduced version of an early Pixar short, Knick Knack, made "safe" under Disney’s homogenizing hand. "Exploring the Reef" finds Marlin and Dory intruding on what could have been a genuinely educational piece by Jean-Michel Cousteau about the life of the Great Barrier Reef, while "Mr. Ray's Encyclopedia" offers fishy facts about the characters in the film. "Fisharades" is a two-player set-top game, and "Storytime" is a read-along adventure for the youngest of the young. There's a "Behind the Scenes" section with "Character Interviews" and a five-minute studio tour. Finally, there are trailers, a teaser, some more fish facts, ads, and a poster gallery.

Really, the full-screen version of the film could have been dropped and the majority of the extra content shuffled into the second disc -- the set would have been none the worse.

Finding Nemo is, generally, more ambiguous and cerebral than the average Disney fare. It's the highest-grossing animated film of all time, beating out The Lion King by $12 million (though inflated ticket prices mean that it had less people in the seats). Presented like this, with such a beautiful image on two packed DVDs, it's easy to see why Nemo is worth searching for.

• Go Back