Finding Nemo

Anyone who's every dived a coral reef will know the magic of such an environment. Heck, even watching a documentary gives an impression of the incredible, colourful society down there. So it's a neat choice for Pixar to locate their follow-up to Monsters, Inc. largely on the Great Barrier Reef.

Although Pixar have never topped Toy Story 2, all their subsequent films have been reliable, and better than most other mainstream US movies. With Finding Nemo they continue the trend of producing American cinema's finest family entertainment.

Finding Nemo consists of two stories in parallel: one a quest, the other an escape story (which has passing similarities with Chicken Run). Both begin at home on the reef, where Marlin (voiced by Brooks) obsesses over his Nemo (Gould), his only remaining family as a result of a predator snaffling his wife and all but one of their "over 400 eggs". Sick of his father's over-protectiveness ("I promise I will never let anything happen to you," Marlin declared to his last egg), Nemo ventures beyond the reef's "drop-off" into open water. Bad timing - he's taken by divers and finds himself in a tank in a dentist's surgery in Sydney. There, he's befriended by the other residents, including starfish Peach (Janney) and Moorish Idol fish Gill (Dafoe), the leader of the tank community who's constantly planning escape attempts (mainly fixated with the toilet - "All drains lead to the ocean!"). They're a good bunch, but Nemo is depressed. Worst still, he's due to become a pet to the dentist's sadistic "fish-killer" niece. So the escape plans become more desperate. Marlin, though he doesn't know it, has a race against time.

As his quest starts, Marlin meets Dory (DeGeneres), a thoroughly forgetful blue tang fish. "Is this some kind of practical joke?" Marlin asks of her supposed idiocy. "I suffer from short-term memory. It runs in my family. At least I think it does," she replies. Finding a mask dropped by one of the divers who took Nemo, the pair head for an address in Sydney.

A plot based on travelling the ocean allows Pixar to indulge in a wonderful array of scenarios and characterisation. So, the pair meet three Aussie sharks (Humphries, Bana, Spence), who have a self-help collective where they get together to renew their vows - as Humphries' Great White Bruce puts it: "I am a nice shark, not a mindless eating machine. Fish are friends not food." Then they encounter a shoal that does impressions by forming the shapes of things - including poor, miserable Marlin himself - becoming an arrow to point them to the East Australian Current. A more dangerous situation arises when the pair find themselves in the thick of a mass of jellyfish. Relief is then provided by a group of turtles riding the current, like surfers. Indeed, Crush the turtle is voiced by writer-director Andrew Stanton in true surfer-stoner style ("Taking on the jellies - you've got serious thrill issues, dude. Awesome."). There's also a pelican, Nigel, voiced by Rush, who helps out Marlin and Dory because he's enjoying their saga and wants to spite the greedy seagulls.

It's great stuff - vivid, imaginative, wonderfully voiced by all involved and, this being Pixar, it's also cheeky. There's a sly dig at the habit in Disney films for characters to burst into song: when Dory tries to comfort Marlin with a tune, he says "Dory - no singing!" There are few fart and wee gags ("Don't you people realise we are swimming in our own sh..." says one of the tank fish during an escape plan that involves breaking the filter. "Shhhhh, here we go!"). There's even a very gentle knocking of the US ("Humans, they think they own everything." "Probably American."). The biggest laugh comes with Dory speaking whale language (several dialects of it, in fact). Exasperated by her awful noises, Marlin says: "Dory - this is not 'whale'. You're speaking like an upset stomach." The filmmakers - headed up by Stanton, who also co-wrote and co-directed 1998's A Bug's Life - even manage to squeeze in some neat film references: among them The Shining (Bruce bursting through a door in a sub wreck - "Heeeeere's Brucie!"), The Birds (a high angle view of gulls crowding), and The Perfect Storm (a fishing boat during the denouement).

On a more serious note, though, Finding Nemo deals with issues of the modern family that Disney (which of course, releases Pixar's films) hasn't quite grasped. Toy Story 2 broached the subject of divorce, while Nemo deals with the death of a parent. This may sound familiar from Bambi, but Finding Nemo has some radical notions: essentially Nemo acquires a surrogate mum in the form of a fish that's not only from another species (read ethnic group), but is voiced by a well-known gay actress.