Finding Nemo

An animated film set in the ocean. Marlin is a clownfish. In the first minutes of the film he loses his wife and almost all their eggs; one egg is left. Nemo hatches from it. One of his fins is small and his father will not let him go anywhere. On his first day of school Nemo swims into open water to spite his father and is caught by a diver. From there the film runs on two lines. Marlin crosses the ocean looking for his son; Nemo plans an escape from a dentist's fish tank. A fish attaches herself to Marlin. Dory has short-term memory loss, forgets everything, and carries both the comedy and the feeling of the film. On the way there are sharks, jellyfish, turtles and a whale. What the narrative is interested in is not loss but protection: the film says that a father who protects too much harms his child, and finally makes the father say it. The aquarium section works like a separate film and the characters there are well written on their own. The visual research took a long time. The crew studied underwater light, current and fish movement from observation; how an image behaves inside water had not been solved in animation at this level before. It became the highest-grossing animated film to that point and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. It also had a side effect: sales of clownfish as pets rose after release, which was the opposite of what the film says. Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres and Alexander Gould are among the voices. Andrew Stanton directed. Who it is for: viewers of any age. Who it is not for: the opening scene may be hard for small children.