Finding Nemo: The Thing About Film Criticism ...

     Film is a mysterious thing. It triggers emotional responses in the audience that are as surprising as they are all-encompassing. As a medium, film is capable of painting stunning vistas that feel like they could only come to life behind the silver screen, but many of the most arresting displays on film arise from scenes that are familiar, perhaps even mundanely so. It’s an artform built on rules and guidelines–young film students are probably familiar with principles like the rule of thirds or the Kuleshov effect–but someone tell me the rule that explains why a line like “We’ll always have Paris,” just levels you. There are parts of the film discussion that cannot be anticipated by a formula or a rulebook, and for that we should be grateful.       

Arrival (2016)

    But the thing about film–and especially film criticism–is that film critics are not soothsayers. Their means of divining the artistic merit of a movie are not unknowable. There are patterns and touchstones that grant us a shared language to describe what it is we even want from film. So when we allow mystery to account for the entire discourse, we not only deny ourselves the thrill of analysis, but we also leave the door open for wordsmiths to distort the conversation with a couple of fanciful turns of phrases. It turns film criticism into this game of Emperor’s New Clothes. This is not the artistic ecosystem we should be aspiring to.

With that in mind, let’s dig into arguably the 21st century’s greatest animated film, or indeed one of its greatest films in general, Pixar’s 2003 masterwork, Andrew Stanton's Finding Nemo. 

Once in a blue moon I will encounter people who admit to not being on the “Nemo” train, but they are also usually quick to identify themselves as contrarians. If I were saddled with the impossible task of identifying a single film that everyone liked, this would probably be the safest bet. Because it’s not just that the film sits on the title of best-selling DVD of all time (and with home media market going the way it is, I don’t see it ever relinquishing that honor), the movie is rightfully celebrated by critics as a hallmark of not just animation but filmmaking in its totality. Mark Caro of The Chicago Tribute declared, 

"‘Finding Nemo’ and its Pixar predecessors tap into the shared gene among the kids and adults that delights in imagination-engaging, eye-tickling and wit-filled storytelling. You connect to these sea creatures as you rarely do with humans in big-screen adventures. The result: a true sunken treasure." 

    In Pixar’s landscape of filmmaking mastery, Finding Nemo stands out to many as their apex achievement, and I think it is worth asking why that is. There's a surprisingly large swath of the film population that is content to just write it off as some unexplained phenomenon. Yes, I see this with casual filmgoers, but I also see it at work with professional critics who tend to just write-off "Nemo's" success as pure serendipity. "Who would have guessed that a cartoon could be as good as a 'real film'?"

But there are a lot of factors that go into a film's impact. Just in the space of writing, you have to develop the story's conflict and the character arc, and in a way that makes all these story elements feel cohesive and unified. Much of what a film critic does is train themselves in the nuances of how these things develop and manifest in filmmaking. It is a film's job to be mysterious: it is a film critic's job to not only decode the mystery, but to do so in a way that is accessible for the average viewer.

Critics are the first line of defense for new movies entering the arena, and the dialogue they create leaves an impact on the media landscape. And if critics stop expending their goodwill based on a film’s novelty, insight, or general excellence, if studios see that these things no longer matter next to a well-spun takedown, could we really blame them for diverting their efforts into making Toy Story 72? 

And so I feel like there needs to be an increased discussion on what exactly makes a masterwork like Finding Nemo so fantastic in part to enforce some accountability to film critics, which is what I want to bring here today. There are a lot of different vantage points from which to discuss a movie like Finding Nemo, within the context of the Pixar canon, animated film in general, or the film library as a whole. But the most interesting points for me center around the movie's animation, its themes and influences, and the general writing quality.

 

Big Blue World

           Computer animation had only been telling feature-length stories for not even ten years by the time “Nemo” swam into theaters. If you just let yourself sit with the knowledge of just how rapidly the medium evolved, it’s honestly a little baffling. 

    But the remarkable thing to me about the animation in Finding Nemo isn’t just that the film looks realistic or even “pretty.” That overwhelming visual spectacle is also an active agent in the storytelling. After all, the film rests on this journey that father and son are going to take in discovering that this world full of peril and disaster is also a thing of beauty, and so that is also an experience you need to create for the audience. The clearest way to achieve this is to paint a world that is itself overflowing with serenity and wonder, and Finding Nemo had to straddle a few lines to pull that off.

The Lego Movie (2014), Waking Life (2001)

    Caricature and realism are things you have to balance mindfully in any film, especially animated film. Neither form is necessarily better than the other--both require their own unique skill sets and accomplish different purposes--but animation as a whole generally feels the need to prove itself as a realistic artform capable of capturing the same gravitas that “real films” do. For the first decade of computer animation feature filmmaking, the question on everyone’s mind seemed to be whether it could be “realistic.” Finding Nemo was possibly the medium’s greatest push to achieve this, at least up until then. In the words of Andrew Stanton, 

“I knew this film would have a balance of reality and fantasy, but be a little more skewed to reality than Toy Story or A Bug’s Life. But what that exactly meant would be subtle; I couldn’t lay down the rule book. In CG there aren’t limits anymore, so it’s always an artistic choice about how to blend caricature with reality, how exaggerated and how real to make something …” 

    Finding Nemo ends up landing in a place that is close to realism, incorporating things like believable fish anatomy and floating ocean speck, while also affording its cast very human-like personality. But this realism only ends up enhancing the film's fantastical feel. With a backdrop as vibrant as the great barrier reef, you can afford to lean realistic and trust that the final product will still look a movie where animals talk. 

    Storyboard artist Ralph Eggleston cited Disney’s Bambi as an influence on the look of the reef, recalling the soft water-color feel of the film, which helps account for the mysterious yet familiar atmosphere of the underwater world. Stanton further explained, “When Ralph and I talked about the coral reefs, we discussed how incredibly complicated and detailed they are. Your first impression is that it’s intensely detailed like a Jackson Pollock painting. It’s already so fantastical you can’t exaggerate it. But we realized we could caricature it by simplifying things, putting a sense of order to it. That’s when we cracked it and got a slightly fantastical view of reality.”   

            The prospect of a fish cast was another challenge specific to this film. Character designer Dan Lee explained, “The fish are like floating heads, which was an interesting challenge because normally in traditional animation so many emotions are communicated with shoulders, arms, hand gestures—these features were severely limited to nonexistent in the anatomy of the fish. We basically had to invent some tricks to compensate.” Animation is the ideal medium to anthropomorphize whatever into a human-adjacent figure for the audience to engage with. Disney had done this just the previous decade with lions, crabs, teapots, and the like. But again, CGI filmmaking had only been around for ten or so years. These were untested concepts.

    Recall how the very next year, Dreamworks would try its own hand at underwater storytelling with Shark Tale, and you’ll notice that most of the fish characters in that movie are still rigged liked humans, always positioned “standing up” and articulating their fins in basically the exact same way humans use their arms and hands (even wearing clothes …) which makes the ambitions behind “Nemo” that much more daunting. But the pay-offs speak for themselves.

A clownfish specifically is a solid choice for a protagonist for this story for a number of reasons, such that it doesn’t feel like Stanton just picked a fish out of a bowl at random and decided to cast it in his movie. From a visual standpoint, a clownfish’s bright orange coloring forms a perfect contrast against the deep blue of the ocean. (The official term is complementary colors—I see you, Vis Design 101 students.) The image is more striking and also serves a thematic point, constantly highlighting how out of place Marlin is in this big blue world. Dory meanwhile, is defined by her deep blue color palette. This not only makes her look at home in the ocean that Marlin is so afraid of, but it also sets her as a counteragent to Marlin himself, constantly forcing him out of his comfort zone and exposing him to ideas that challenge his limited worldview. 

         The thrill of building an underwater playground using computer generated animation had teased director Andrew Stanton during the early days of development on Toy Story, nearly ten years before "Nemo" would be ready, while visiting an aquarium with his family. The idea for what to do with this came to him when he landed on the film's central theme during a father-son outing. Stanton recalls an episode taking his son out of the park when he became aware of his own Marlin-like tendencies as he became so preoccupied with keeping his son from getting hurt that both he and his son ended up having a miserable time. He landed on the conclusion that “fear could prevent a good father from being one,” a variation on a theme that had been playing around at Pixar since very early on. 

 

Theme and Influence

     So, here's an idea: things have influences. Art especially has influences because artists love drawing upon work that inspires them. Seeing bits of films inside other films is kind of an inevitable byproduct of growing more media literate, and honestly, that's part of the fun. 

Singin' in the Rain (1952), Moulin Rouge! (2001)

    I bring this up because another one of the traps critics sometimes build for themselves is this downplaying of the artistic economy. Lines like "we've seen this all before" can occasionally slide into fallacies, suppositions that good films do not borrow generously from older movies, which does not comply with the reality of artistic creation.

            If you look at a lot of the early Pixar films, for example, you can get an idea for what the favorite movies were for Pixar’s first directors. Marlin and Dory have a dynamic that feels very Bringing Up Baby, and the tank gang plays like a remix of the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Those early Pixar films also have a lot of Office Space, seen most prominently in the in-universe workplaces of Monsters Inc. and The Incredibles. And maybe one day we'll take a look at the horror movies that informed Toy Story.

           But the movie that seems to have had the most influence on Pixar’s early years is Kramer vs Kramer, a 1979 dramedy directed by Robert Benton starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. The film sees Hoffman playing a marketing executive, and neglectful father and husband, who suddenly becomes the sole caregiver to his young son after his wife (Streep) has a nervous breakdown and leaves him. The story’s tension comes from this business titan being torn as his new responsibility seems to be taking him away from his mission as a man to excel at his career at all costs. This is at times stressful, comedic, and—eventually—heartening. As Hoffman’s character allows himself to embrace his role as a father, he finds a sense of fulfillment that his career world could never offer him. So when his ex-wife reappears demanding custody of their son, he goes to court to fight for the right to be a father. 

The idea that dads need to find a healthy-work-life balance had obviously been around before, but this usually featured as a backdrop to the larger plot. Kramer vs Kramer was arguably the first film to really look at where fatherhood fit into this dichotomy of manhood in a world that tells men that the best thing they can be is a master in the world of business and career, and to hinge the bulk of the film on this specific throughline. Incidentally, this vantage point is also what separated much of Pixar’s early work from other animated fare at the time. Though Pixar could be said to be targeting a young audience, the adult characters were generally the point of view characters. Yes, Nemo has his own internal journey, but his storyline is supplementary to Marlin’s. I was a kid during Pixar’s first golden age, and it honestly didn’t make a difference to me that “dad” was the main character.

    So while Hollywood at large would almost turn this archetype into a cliche, you can definitely see the way this influenced Pixar’s earliest films. Almost all of their films from their first decade somehow centered on fathers or father surrogates navigating their responsibilities as caregivers. This character evolution often put them in direct opposition to that most powerful influence in the male world: the pressure of the workplace and the tease of career celebrity, which is where the Kramer vs Kramer connection really rings loud. 

    Consider, for example, how Pixar’s perennial film (Toy Story, for those keeping track) follows two paragons of masculinity competing basically to be the favorite parent to their child-insert. This connection is perhaps most clear in Monsters Inc. where Mike and Sulley are on the brink of career stardom when they are effectively called to be fathers to this helpless human child, and they end up bringing down their entire workplace in order to fulfill this role. (The only outlier might be a bug’s life, but even that film still has Flik acting as a strong male role model for Dot, an attribute that helps signal to the audience that he is a sympathetic character even as his own network looks down on him for failing in the masculine sphere of the workplace.) But “Nemo” was the first Pixar film to actually let the characters say “father.” Where in the earlier Pixar films it was implied, Finding Nemo brought fatherhood to the forefront.

This is similar to what we discussed when we looked at Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World which also probes the overlap between fatherhood and a form of fully realized masculinity. (Finding Nemo also got a shoutout in that essay, I guess it’s only symmetrical for me to return the favor.) I noted that said movie forecasted and perhaps even enabled this renaissance of pop culture hero dads as seen with media like The Mandalorian. The Pixar dads entered the game even more recently, and we perhaps owe our critical reevaluation of manhood to them as well. 

    The somewhat fallacious idea of the older Pixar movies having some secret sauce is one that we’ll dive into more, but if there was one story element that sort of defined those early Pixar masterworks, it was probably their unique interest in exploring the intricacies of a man's capacity for caregiving. (I don’t know, maybe that’s why the lines specifically about ONWARD being somehow a divergence from the Pixar standard read as a very shallow reading of their filmography, but I digress …) Around the time of Ratatouille and Wall-E, Pixar started finding new soil to till, but frankly, I feel like the world is that much better for the attention Pixar gave to this subject. 

But while we’re here, though, this discussion on the Pixar dudes does come with some warts that we need to acknowledge. On the one hand, Pixar gave male viewers space to explore manhood with nuance and intricacy, and in a light that is not often represented in mainstream media. On the other hand, Pixar’s deference to the male gender for its first fifteen or so years of filmmaking does reveal some blind spots, particularly for women. 

    Consider that 2012’s Brave was their first film to center on a female protagonist. This came a full seventeen years into the game, and even that milestone is marred by factors like the treatment of original director Brenda Chapman, including her dismissal from this project that she pioneered herself. The fact that the films were so enthusiastic about the nuances of manhood does kind of betray that these same films did not keep the gates open for women. To be clear, I am not equating Mike and Sulley’s healthy friendship with some form of toxic masculinity—I would in fact argue the opposite. (Credit also needs to be given to those early female characters like Jessie, Princess Atta, Dory, and Helen who even in male-centered stories stood out as fully fleshed out characters on their own.) I just acknowledge that there are two faces to this coin. 

I honestly probably wouldn’t even have this hanging question mark if not for the John Lasseter shaped shadow looming over Pixar. The fact that one of the founding members of Pixar is now known to have been guilty of a lot of lecherous behavior, and also encouraged a culture at Pixar that was, in the words of blogger and former Pixar animator Cassandra Smolcic, “a sexist boys’ club,” it does kind of cast a shadow over the first two-thirds of Pixar’s reign and their long line of male-centered stories. (Though apparently, it didn’t cast a long enough shadow that studios like Sky Dance don’t still want to hire Lasseter back into positions of authority, or that prominent outlets like The New York Times won’t report on his “professional redemption.”)

But at the same time, Lasseter wasn’t the only author in the Pixar story, we don’t need to give him so much credit by pretending he was. Storytelling is a team effort, and when someone compromises the integrity of that team, you dispense with them, and then you ask how he got there in the first place. Moreover, there is a wide gap between the kind of masculinity embodied by the likes of Marlin and Sulley and what Lasseter was doing. We can be grateful that players like Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and Brad Bird cared enough to invest in stories about healthy masculinity while also demanding consequences when men like Lasseter betray that spirit. That's also nothing to say of women like Darla K Andersen, Kori Rae, and Lindsey Collins who also helped carry Pixar during those formative years.

Domee Shi, the queen behind Turning Red

    Something we really need to hit is that it doesn’t mark any loss of vision or skill that Pixar as a studio did eventually start exploring other emotional terrain in their stories. Metaphorical father stories were eventually going to get old, and scouting new territory also helped open the doors for more diverse faces behind and in front of the screen. Movies like Elemental, Inside Out, or Turning Red that put female characters in the driver’s seat did not somehow take them away from what made them great at the game of storytelling.

    The patterns of early Pixar storytelling reveal something about the studio that created these stories and the society that received them, and they also make for a fun talking point during the family reunion, but the patterns themselves are not what made Pixar great. Making quality films carries far beyond just the pitch. Not every movie premised on dads learning how to be dads is going to be revelatory or even competent. (Where are the accolades for Eddie Murphy in Daddy Day Care?) What really set Pixar apart wasn’t just the kinds of stories it told, but how it told them. The true secret to Pixar’s success is that they play by the same rules as everyone else: it all comes down to good storytelling.

Writing Nemo

              One of the keys to the success of Finding Nemo’s screenplay (for which it received an Oscar nomination, a rare feat for an animated film) is that every element of the story serves the larger themes and destinations of the film. None of the story's moving parts feel like distractions or deviations.

    You see this perhaps most clearly in the script's clever use of shorthand, connotation, and allusion. Clownfish, for example, exist in the popular imagination as these little homebodies who keep themselves tethered to their anemones, which makes the prospect of one of these little guys crossing an entire ocean kind of an incredible feat.

    Sharks also carry a specific meaning in pop culture, and the film is certainly leaning on this expectation when Bruce, named for the mechanical shark used in the production of Jaws (itself named for Steven Spielberg’s lawyer), invites these two bite-sized fish to a party. The movie subverts these expectations by planting these killing machines in what adult audiences will recognize as an AA meeting. 

    The movie traces out the full circle of Marlin’s psychological fears of the worst of what the ocean has to offer, immediately confronting him with the most feared ocean predator only to immediately humanize and demystify him by painting him as a struggling addict who maybe feels bad about his carnivorous reputation. (Of course, the film still gives Bruce an excuse to relapse so we can still have a shark chase.) And the movie does this by smartly playing into concepts and ideas with which the audience is familiar without having to draw the lines explicitly. 

            You also have to be careful with shorthand and be mindful of what people or class you are invoking and how you are presenting the subject. Shorthand can indulge in and perpetuate stereotypes when done carelessly. “Nemo” does a good job at sidestepping this because it stays away from awkward social dynamics. I think the closest we get to the coding of a marginalized group is Crush the sea turtle as a stand-in for California beach bums, who don’t really fit into the kinds of conversations we usually have about these things. 

    But the Crush comparison works not only because it's not punching down, but because the connotation is relevant to Marlin’s journey. Crush’s freestyle parenting is a complete contrast to Marlin’s hyper-dictated approach. A chill surfer bro is exact kind of figure who would believably deliver this idea that sometimes the best thing a parent can do for their kid is go with the flow. Crush also enters the story at a point in Marlin’s story where he is actually finally questioning the truthfulness of his worldview and is finally open to reconsidering how he views his obligation as a parent. Marlin would have needed to encounter Bruce first for the Crush chapter to make sense.

            But shorthand doesn’t just pertain to characters. Something like Marlin and Dory being swallowed by a whale echoes the story of Jonah and the whale, and stimulating the audience’s cultural memory like that can lend a story more authority. “Nemo” is full of this. The story of a clownfish taking on an entire ocean already has a massive sense of scale to it, but set pieces like sunken World War II ships carry heavy gravitas without the characters themselves having to remark upon them because they lean on cultural foreknowledge of these things. (And the almost biblical scale of this story is part of the reason why Finding Dory really falls flat as a follow-up. We go from this undersea odyssey to an afternoon at the aquarium …)

            So there’s a lot about this story that works in the macro, but the genius of the movie also lies in the details. 

Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

    Of all the rules that go into filmmaking, character arc is arguably the most important to understand because in a character-bound film economy, a strong arc provides an anchor for the entire film. Screenwriter and Professor at Los Angeles University, Linda Cowgill, explains character arcs saying, “As in real life, struggle and frustration in the face of overwhelming obstacles can often, if one perseveres, lead to a new understanding of oneself and the conflicts one faces. A screenwriter, then, must know or have an idea regarding what the protagonist needs. The writer translates this need into an inner problem for the character or into a realization by the character propelled by his outer struggles and frustrations. Then, the screenwriter creates a line of action, incorporating this need, and externalizes the problem in the construct of the subplot.” 

Much of why Marlin’s story is so satisfying is that he has such a strong character arc: his starting and end points are so clearly delineated, and each of his little mini-adventures along the way have direct influence on his development. It's not just that we know exactly where the film wants him to go, but Marlin's journey to getting there feels honest and earned.

           At the basis of any character arc is a strong sense of conflict, and this manifests in two ways. The external conflict puts the protagonist in opposition to actual forces or systems that they must defeat to achieve or win something. The internal conflict sees the protagonist wrestling with some moral issue or discrepancy that they must reconcile or overcome. Example, the external conflict in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is between James Stewart and the corrupt U.S. Senators while the internal conflict is whether commitment to principles and virtue can actually overpower the selfish machinations that have taken root in a system like the American government.

            We don’t have to look far to find the external and internal conflicts of Finding Nemo. External conflict: Marlin has to face an entire ocean of dangers in order to get his son back from the humans. Internal conflict: Marlin has to reconcile his paralyzing fear of the world with his fatherly responsibilities to a son who must also live in this world. 

         Dory is the biggest agent in helping Marlin close the gap, basically acting as a cipher for Marlin to understand his relationship with Nemo. At the start, Marlin only sees Dory for all the ways she poses either a distraction or a liability, but Dory’s spiritedness is a large part of what helps Marlin to achieve his goal to rescue his son. The readiness with which she approaches something like sharks inviting her over for dinner is a total contrast to the way Marlin would just retreat at the first sign of trouble or even discomfort, but this tenacity helps catalyze many of the plot pieces that push Marlin out of the reef and into the unknown.

The hanging irony is that Dory should be the more vulnerable of the two. Her naivete and memory impairment in theory leave her very at risk in a world that is rife with danger. But both the audience and Marlin come to see that Dory leans into the world in all its spontaneity, and that leaves her better suited for the world than Marlin’s paranoia ever did for him, and Marlin recognizing that she has useful abilities and viewpoints is a key part of his evolution.

    But the load needs to be carried not just on the characters themselves, but on the situations they find themselves in. To achieve a character arc for your protagonist, you need to be consistently putting them in scenarios that will challenge them, not just their resolve, but their worldview. Rain Man, for example, sees Tom Cruise playing a self-centered business mogul. When he becomes convinced that effectively kidnapping his newly discovered autistic brother (played by Dustin Hoffman, him again) will force his father’s estate to grant him the money he is believed he is owed, Tom Cruise’s character is suddenly put in a position where he has to be constantly mindful of someone who cannot look after himself, and all his experiences in taking care of his brother start to chip away at his built-in selfishness.

Marlin could have found any number of things to do until he and Dory stumbled into the dentist office, but in order for a story's conclusion to feel earned, the steppingstones have to be actively advancing character development. Let’s quickly review the main sequence of events in Marlin’s quest and look for what lessons Marlin is learning through each chapter: 

         -The shark encounter confronts Marlin with the idea that the looming threats of the ocean are not always so clear. By design, Bruce and his buddies should want to make Marlin dinner, but Marlin finds out that just because something could hurt him, that doesn’t mean it will.

         -Their dive into the abyss is where Dory assures Marlin that even when he is wandering into total darkness, if he “just keeps swimming,” he will eventually find what he’s looking for, even if he has to outrun an anglerfish or two along the way. 

        -The signal fish and jellyfish episodes show Marlin that he can’t only ever trust own instincts. The school of fish are initially put off by Marlin’s stodginess, and so Dory in all her endearingness has to go to bat for him to get them on his side. Then when he disregards Dory’s direction to swim through the trench, he nearly gets both of them killed.

              -Crush and the turtle pod introduce the idea that when left to their own devices, children will eventually learn how to swim without parents needing to rescue them--and that the children themselves will know when they are ready to make this jump.

           -Marlin gets a second chance to prove he’s learned his lesson from the jellyfish when he allows himself to trust Dory to enlist the help of the whale. At first, Marlin thinks he made a mistake when the whale swallows them both, which is why he is hesitant to believe that the whale is not going to digest them, but in choosing to let go and accept the unknown, he sees that the whale has carried them all the way to Sydney Harbor, exactly where he needed to go.

            -This is all put to the ultimate test when Marlin finally has Nemo back but is then faced with the choice of whether to let his son swim straight into danger if it means saving their friend. 

The thing to keep in mind is that Marlin would have never let Nemo go in the beginning, and that is why this character beat is so powerful. This trust in Nemo is what Marlin needed to learn right from the start, and this is also why Finding Nemo as a story works so well. Marlin spends the entire film not only removing literal obstacles that are keeping him from his son (external conflict), but also peeling away at the emotional baggage that drove Nemo away in the first place (internal conflict). It’s not just that Marlin is a different person, but it’s also that we have seen him become that different person–we went on that journey with him.

            In some ways, the construction of a solid narrative is almost mathematical. There are universal principles that make narrative as a device function. A filmmaker can be creative with how these are applied, but there is a meter and rhythm to how things like tension and character arcs play out (e.g. set-up should come before the pay-off). 

    Yet at the same time, good films feel organic, spontaneous, personal. The kind of story that might have struck a dad taking his son to the aquarium or the playground. These tools we discuss all exist in service of creating something emotionally truthful. A scene like Marlin rescuing Nemo's egg and promising that he'll never let anything happen to him obviously has a lot going for it emotionally. But finding these emotional hotspots is the easy part. Fortifying them with all the instruments under a storyteller's arsenal, carving out a vessel that is worthy of the human psyche in all its intricacies, is the real test. 

    But when a film does earn that crescendo, when you retrace the film's footsteps and understand exactly how it led you to a space that feels at once arresting and invigorating, the pay-offs can be staggering.

 

Why Nemo? Why Now?

So … why am I talking about Finding Nemo now?

    Well, a part of it is realizing that though I claim to be a huge fan of Pixar’s work, their films have been curiously absent from the list of films I’ve analyzed and celebrated. I've never had trouble tapping into my enthusiasm for Disney animation, but thus far, the Pixar film that has received the most attention from me was Toy Story 4, and you all know how I feel about that movie. Part of this is also my evolving feelings about the observations I made about Pixar as a whole when I released that series a few years back about critics and their deceptively complex relationship to their filmography. 

Yes, critics were happy to give Finding Nemo the thumbs up, but you also had people like Jeff Strickler of the Star Tribune wedging their praise with caveats about how Finding Nemo wasn’t as good as Pixar’s best work, saying that the film "proves that even when Pixar is not at the top of its game, it still produces better animation than some of its competitors on their best days." These quid pro quos seem really flimsy in hindsight given that no one really doubts that Finding Nemo is absolutely Pixar at its peak, though I honestly don’t think we need to dwell on them except insofar as we remember that critics have always felt nervous about declaring even Pixar movies “classics” until they’re sure everyone else feels the same.

    This was kind of the basis of my Pixar series, where I was mostly just frustrated with film critics for refusing to acknowledge that, “yes, ONWARD is every bit as good as Pixar’s best films, and you numbskulls can’t even articulate a convincing counterargument!” But I had kind of hoped that time would make a fool of me, and my observations would fall out of relevancy. Like, this would be a specific trial that ONWARD and its awkward release date would have to bear alone. Yet here we are three and a half years later, and we have seen several other solid works from Pixar receive largely lukewarm from critics—critics who claim that Pixar has just lost their way, but can’t for the life of them explain why.

At a glance, the idea of critics somehow turning on Pixar might seem like a bit of a stretch. Luca, ONWARD, Turning Red, and Elemental, were all nominated for best animated picture in their respective years. But take a look, for example, at the opening for Deadline’s review of Elemental:

"What has fallen flat at Pixar? This is the innovative animation studio that pushed all before it in the first decade of this millennium, that invented a way of turning the plastic finish of digital animation to its advantage in the towering Toy Story, that was prepared to start a film with a 20-minute scene with no dialogue in WALL-E – and revealed that kids didn’t care – and that would make an adventure film with a hero aged 78 years young in UP!. Kids didn’t care about that either, as it turned out, because Carl Fredricksen was a grumpy-gramps adventurer who also didn’t care what others thought of him. Pixar always had something new up its collective artistic sleeve. And yet here they are, coming out with a film as dull-witted and syrupy as Elemental." 

After sounding off on all these accolades for the original Pixar films (talking points that were absolutely tested and proved by older film critics), the review manages to score some points for itself by calling out the gendered stereotyping of having Wade (a “transparent sausage of wet love,” exact quote) be an engineer. It bolsters every observation with the assurance that even the children will be embarrassed to be served a film that is so heavy-handed in its presentation, a claim that itself could use some supporting. The review even culminates with a snappy zinger about how “Elemental could, in fact, simply have been called Sentimental. It would have saved time.”

When you dig into the arguments this review is making about the film, you find there’s very little in here that lines up with film criticism. Certainly, an individual critic’s subjectivity is a part of what makes film analysis so lively, but I don’t read this review calling out the false advertising of focusing on four literal elements instead of the entire periodic table and think, “Interesting perspective. I hadn’t noticed that.” I think, “... that’s honestly what stood out to you?” 

    This is very safe criticism. This is exactly the thing that Ratatouille’s Anton Ego calls out in his in-movie review when he talks about critics risking very little while holding the knife over those who are putting their heart and soul on display. This dialogue doesn’t do anything to scout out weak points in Pixar’s storytelling, it’s just using clever rhetoric to show-off to the reader that they’re smarter than a kid’s movie.

It’s been somewhat easy for critics to feel assured that their insights are pure and true seeing how Pixar films have not been performing as strongly at the box office as movies like “Nemo” did. Some critics have tried to piece together a coherent narrative about why these films have been underperforming, like this piece from The New York Times. 

"Although not saying so directly, Mr. Docter also indicated that Pixar had perhaps drifted too far from its storytelling roots.

"In recent years, Pixar has allowed filmmakers like Peter Sohn, who made 'Elemental,' to explore stories that are more personal. (Mr. Sohn’s immigrant parents inspired his film.) Yet many of Pixar’s biggest original successes, including 'Toy Story' in 1995 and 'Monsters, Inc.' in 2001, have grown from more universal concepts — 'ideas that we all carried around as kids,' as Mr. Docter put it. What if my toys come to life when I leave the room? What if there are monsters in my closet?"

Well, I guess now we know who that one guy is who gave Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma the thumbs down for being “too personal” … 

            The reasons for why these films have seen fewer immediate financial returns have nothing to do with the Pixar story process somehow failing and more to do with external factors, like the mismanagement of Disney+. These films were also unfortunate victims of the global shutdown with ONWARD literally dropping into theaters five days before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. But with Elemental overcoming the applesauce criticism it faced opening weekend and becoming a genuine box office bounty, you kind of get the idea that all of these films would have found success had they been dealt a fair hand (or really any hand given how many of these films did not premiere theatrically). As far as reasons for why critics are withholding from new Pixar movies, we can perhaps speculate. 

#NeverForgetTreasurePlanet

              One aspect of the conversation that is kind of taken for granted is that Pixar's victory lap was happening alongside Disney Animation's financial slump in the 2000s, which many of the contemporary reviews gave direct mention to. It follows that a sizeable portion of the critical establishment hopped on the Pixar train in part because it gave them a higher standpoint from which to dump on Disney while it was on its knees. I guess that once Pixar became fully inducted into the Disney empire, that just stopped being fun, so critics withdrew their support and started spinning whatever pseudo-logic they could find to disguise the fact that critics can only talk nice about cartoons for so long ...

    At some point, it was always going to stop being edgy to declare Pixar as “the good animation studio.” It was only ever a question of whether that jump was going to be matched by any true shift in quality from their filmmakers. (Ironically, the one recent Pixar film to be embraced by critics was 2020’s Soul, which I actually had a very muted reaction to.) We’ve seen Pixar playing around with new subjects and methods of filmmaking, but where it really counts with storytelling, they’re just as committed to their craft. And so in lieu of legitimate issues, critics fall back on vague notions of ONWARD and Turning Red “lacking spark or emotional resonance," or irritations that "we've all seen this before," (a slippery foundation given that all of Pixar's elder films absolutely had influences of their own). 

And Luca gave me a hankering for gelato
from which I will never recover

            We could easily apply the same degree of analysis we afforded to “Nemo” today to most of these newer films (and with time, I may be lucky enough to do just that) and we would arrive at many of the same conclusions. Ian’s character arc in ONWARD is just as refined and poignant as Marlin’s. Elemental brought literal balls of fire and water to life in a way that was not only believable, but emotionally investing. And I’ve never been the child of a Chinese-immigrant family, or a teenage girl desperate to sneak out to see my favorite boy band, but Turning Red absolutely made these feelings accessible. These are all echoes of the things we discussed that made films like Finding Nemo such a standout. As far as I’m concerned, Pixar’s golden age never really stopped. You could argue it took a breather during that decade of sequels, but even this timeframe still gave us movies like Inside Out and Coco. When you look at the chemistry of why a film like Finding Nemo succeeds, the laziness with which critics dismiss a film like Elemental becomes inexcusable. 

I don’t want to end on such a sour note, so I’ll just wrap up by saying that Finding Nemo is one of my favorite movies. A part of why animation is experiencing such a renaissance today is because of movies like Finding Nemo that helped legitimize the artform and reaffirmed what most of us had already known, that good stories will find us in any number of spaces if we are willing to receive them. Over twenty years out, and I am still grateful that, whatever the prevailing attitudes of critics then or now, the filmmakers at Pixar just threw out the rulebook and made the best film they could. 

             --The Professor