Jeremy’s Tophunder №76: Finding Nemo
Oh, yeah, I like animation too.
All told, there are nine animated movies in my Top 100, four from Pixar.
I remember when and where I was when I saw Finding Nemo the first time. I used to go to an overnight summer camp in New Hampshire, and for those campers that stayed multiple sessions, there was a full day off in between Session 2 and Session 3 in the middle of the summer, so that counselors could have an extra day off. Parents who lived relatively close would come pick up their kids and go to the beach or whatever, but for campers who lived further away, the camp would put together a day trip around the area. My parents lived three hours away, so I was stuck going on this random trip with kids I barely knew — they weren’t from my cabin.
We ended up going out to lunch, and then going to a movie at whatever strip mall was closest to camp. I remember distinctly, every single camper wanted to see either Terminator 3 or Pirates of the Caribbean. Not a single one of us had any interest in seeing Finding Nemo. It was 2003, and we were all between 12 and 14 — the sweet spot for when “kids’ movies” are the least cool they will ever be.
I was wrong. We were all wrong.
If you haven’t seen it recently, the first 40 minutes or so are -a lot- darker than you remember them being. Trust me. It opens with a barracuda attacking Marlin and his wife, ultimately killing/eating Coral and all of her eggs, save for one (Nemo, duh). Follow that up with Marlin and Nemo having a pretty heated argument, leading to Nemo swimming out into open ocean and being kidnapped by divers. Marlin desperately tries to rescue him, to no avail. He then runs into a shark, which brings him against his will into a sunken war ship, where he tries to eat Marlin (and his new friend) until he accidentally detonates an underwater minefield.
Like, read that back again. This is a kids’ movie?
Watching it recently, it wasn’t quite as funny as I remember it being. The biggest laugh was when the pelican flew into the dentist’s window while he was pulling a tooth. The Dentist, startled, yanks the tooth, goes over to check the window, then remarks, “well, good thing I pulled the right one, eh Prime Minister?” Not sure how I never caught that line before.
Even with the lack of laughs, the story and the animation are both still great. It’s a classic road movie storyline, which makes it easy to follow and digest, but also easy to get sucked into the emotion and sentimentality of the characters, their journey, and the cathartic resolution of their goals. The animation, meanwhile, is classic Pixar. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I always seem to spend the first 10 minutes of a Pixar movie thinking “this isn’t what things are supposed to look like” (duh, it’s computer animation), but by the end of the movie, I’ve normalized the animation so much that when I stumbled across photos of fish, the photos looked fake and I trusted the animation. Similar things happened for me with Toy Story and Monsters Inc. When Pixar movies don’t involve a lot of human characters, the animation somehow seems more and more realistic, until you snap back out of it.
Is that just me? Okay, maybe it’s just me.
When I watch animation, a big part of my enjoyment is the voice acting. It’s a lot harder than people realize to sit in a recording booth for hours on end, reading lines into a microphone, sometimes effectively all by yourself, and still get all of the emotion and feeling into each line of dialogue. When voice acting is great, like Robin Williams in Aladdin or Billy Crystal in Monsters Inc. or Jeremy Irons in The Lion King, it can take over (in a good way) and becoming a defining feature of the movie.
Finding Nemo, however, doesn’t really blow me away with its voice acting. Ellen DeGeneres (as Dory) is clearly the high point, and Allison Janney (as the starfish at the dentist’s office) and John Ratzenberger (a cameo as the school of charades-playing moonfish) are both great, but that’s kinda it. I’ve never been overly impressed with Albert Brooks — I just find his voice a bit grating. Nobody else really impressed me that much, even though there were some big names — Willem Dafoe as Gill, Brad Garrett as Bloat, and Geoffrey Rush as Nigel the pelican. None of them really stood out. If anything, that’s the element of the movie I’m most disappointed with.
This is one of the rare instances where a movie makes the list even though I (probably) enjoy it slightly less than movies that didn’t make the list. I’ve seen Finding Nemo so many times that a lot of its re-watchability has been drained. If you gave me a choice today, I’d probably rather watch Monsters Inc, A Bug’s Life, Mulan, or The Lego Movie, none of which ended up making the list, as much as I love all of them. But Finding Nemo represents an important moment in my life. It’s the animated movie that reminded me how much I love animation. I remember liking Mulan a lot in 1998, but after that, there’s a full five-year gap where I didn’t have much of a positive relationship with animation. I wasn’t a huge fan of Shrek at the time (I like it a little more now, but it never got serious consideration for the Top 100), and I didn’t see Monsters Inc until after Finding Nemo. Among the 100 movies that I would like to watch right now, Finding Nemo probably doesn’t crack the list. But it warrants inclusion if for no other reason than it helped me to fall back in love with animation. Ironically, of the eight other animated movies on the list, only two of them were released after Finding Nemo (№38 and №57 on the list, more on them later), but that doesn’t mean I appreciate and love Finding Nemo any less. It was one of the harder movies on the list to place. It got as high as the 30s, and as low as the 90s. Ultimately, I put it №76, to kick off the last quarter of my list.
Animation is a style of movie that isn’t taken nearly seriously enough. Everyone loves it as a kid, but it seems like we all reach an age when we stop considering animated movies as consequential and “important” as live-action movies geared towards adults. We still feel a lot of nostalgia for the animated movies that came out when we were kids, and even as adults, we still enjoy new animated movies. But it seems like a lot of us dismiss them because they’re saccharine and geared towards kids. That may be, but that doesn’t make them any less important or meaningful.
(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)
Here’s our progress on the list so far:
6. The Fugitive
17. Ocean’s 11
24. Apollo 13
47. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
76. Finding Nemo
85. Seabiscuit
93. The Truman Show
