FINDING NEMO (2003)  ***1/2

Reviewed 6/1/03

Papa fish Marlin (Albert Brooks) with the help of Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), who has short memory lapses, tries to save his son Nemo (Alexander Gould), held captive in the tank of an Australian dentist. The movie still suffers from Pixar’s thematic middlebrow blandness and an unnecessary need to appeal to attention-deficit-disorder youths by being overly hectic, but it’s the company’s most gorgeous film yet. Brooks and DeGeneres’ improvisatory banter aspires to the rat-tat-tat rapid fire of HIS GIRL FRIDAY, and their presence gives the film a greater looseness that the other films lack. Pixar movies are all extremely well crafted, moderately funny, and visually creative, but they also feel calculatedly schematic. The parental control theme is still pressed a little too hard here, especially in an inorganic contrived climax, but the movie as a whole is very funny (DeGeneres has probably never been better and those sharks are a riot), and that’s enough to recommend it heartily.  As weird as it is to say this, the film's embrace of a multinational cadre of sea characters is refreshing in the current U.S. political climate.