Finding Nemo (2003) Review

A Father’s Worst Fear

The film opens with a happy couple of clownfish admiring their new home on the edge of the reef and the hundreds of eggs they’re about to hatch. Then a barracuda strikes. When Marlin wakes, his wife and all but one of their eggs are gone. He holds the last one in his fins, cracked and small, and promises it that nothing will ever happen to it. He names the baby Nemo.

That opening, over in a few minutes, is one of the boldest things Pixar has ever done, and it shapes everything that follows. Marlin becomes the most anxious father in the whole ocean, terrified of every current and every shadow, and Nemo, born with one small fin, grows up desperate to prove he can manage without being watched. Their struggle drives the whole film, from the first scene to the last.

Taken

On Nemo’s first day at school, frustrated and embarrassed by his father’s fussing, he swims out to touch a boat to prove he’s brave. A diver scoops him up without warning and takes him away, and Marlin, frantic, sets off after the boat. Along the way he collides with Dory, a friendly, scatterbrained blue tang with short-term memory loss, who saw the boat and offers to help.

Nemo ends up in a fish tank in a dentist’s office in Sydney, where he meets a group of aquarium fish, led by a scarred, determined Moorish idol named Gill, who dream of escaping to the ocean. The story splits into two parallel adventures: Marlin crossing the ocean, and Nemo plotting a breakout with his new friends. The structure keeps the film constantly moving between danger and comedy.

The two stories also answer each other. While Marlin learns to take risks in the open ocean, Nemo learns that he’s braver and more capable than his father believes. By the time the two threads meet again, both father and son have changed, and their reunion carries the weight of everything each has learned alone.

Marlin and Dory

Albert Brooks voices Marlin with a perfect blend of neurosis, grief and dry wit. Marlin is a worrier and a pessimist, a fish who tells jokes badly and expects the worst, and Brooks makes him funny and heartbreaking at once. He crosses the ocean and, just as importantly, crosses out of his own fear, and every mile he swims takes him further from the reef and closer to trusting the world.

Ellen DeGeneres voices Dory, and Dory stands with the great comic creations in animation: sweet, relentlessly optimistic, easily distracted and occasionally wise. Her memory loss is the source of constant jokes, and it also gives her a kind of fearlessness, since she can’t dwell on danger. She teaches Marlin that sometimes you have to just keep swimming.

The friendship between the anxious father and the carefree stranger is the film’s comic engine and its emotional core. By the end, each has changed the other, and Dory’s fear of being left alone gives the story one of its most moving moments, when she begs Marlin not to leave her because she remembers things better with him.

The Ocean

Finding Nemo was the first Pixar film set largely underwater, and its animators faced enormous technical challenges: light filtering through water, drifting particles, moving kelp, shifting currents and the way color fades with depth. The results were astonishing at the time and still look beautiful, a vast, luminous, living world full of color and motion, and it made audiences feel they were diving alongside the characters.

The film moves through a long series of spectacular environments: the bright coral reef, the empty blue of the open ocean, a terrifying abyss lit only by an anglerfish’s lure, a field of pink jellyfish and the rushing tunnel of the East Australian Current. Each has its own palette and mood, and the variety keeps the trip fresh.

Thomas Newman’s score, gentle, shimmering and melancholy, adds to the sense of a vast, mysterious ocean, and it earned an Academy Award nomination. The music is never showy, and it lets the images breathe, rising only for the great emotional moments.

Fish Are Friends

The characters Marlin and Dory meet along the way stand out even in the most memorable in Pixar’s catalogue. Bruce, a great white shark voiced by Barry Humphries, leads a support group for sharks trying to give up eating fish, and his relapse at the smell of blood is both hilarious and frightening. Crush, a laid-back surfer sea turtle voiced by Stanton himself, takes them on a wild ride through the current.

There’s also a flock of seagulls whose only word is mine. A pelican named Nigel befriends the fish in the dentist’s tank, a helpful school of moonfish forms shapes to give directions, and a whale swallows Marlin and Dory and turns out to be surprisingly friendly. Each encounter is a sharp comic set piece, and together they make the ocean feel full of eccentric life.

Crush, in particular, gives the film one of its most touching ideas. The easygoing turtle lets his young son, Squirt, find his own way through the current, and Marlin watches in amazement. It’s the first time he sees a father trust a child to take a risk, and the lesson quietly sinks in.

The Tank Gang

Nemo’s story in the dentist’s office is just as strong. The aquarium fish, a dysfunctional family of misfits including a puffer fish, a cleaner shrimp, a germaphobic damselfish and a starfish obsessed with the dentist’s work, welcome Nemo and enlist him in Gill’s escape plan. Willem Dafoe gives Gill a gruff, weathered dignity, and he becomes a second father figure, one who encourages Nemo to take risks.

The real threat is Darla, the dentist’s niece, a braces-wearing girl who shakes fish bags until their occupants die, and who is due to receive Nemo as a birthday present. Her arrival, accompanied by the shrieking music from Psycho, is one of the film’s great comic horror moments. The escape attempts are inventive and tense, and they give Nemo his own chance to be brave.

Comedy for Every Age

Finding Nemo is one of the funniest films Pixar has made, and its comedy works on several levels at once. Children laugh at the seagulls, the bouncing jellyfish and Dory’s endless forgetfulness. Adults laugh at the sharks’ twelve-step meeting, the dentist’s jargon repeated by the fish in the tank and Marlin’s hopeless attempts to tell a joke. The humour never talks down to either audience.

The script, by Stanton, Bob Peterson and David Reynolds, is packed with quotable lines and running gags, and the voice cast delivers them with perfect timing. Much of the film’s enduring popularity comes from its humour. The jokes have kept it fresh through countless repeat viewings in family living rooms.

Letting Go

Finding Nemo is, above all, about a parent learning to let a child grow up. Marlin’s love for Nemo is so fearful that it becomes a cage, and Nemo’s rebellion comes from wanting to be trusted. Marlin’s voyage across the ocean forces him to take the risks he’s always avoided, and he learns that he can’t protect his son from everything.

The theme is handled with real subtlety. The film never mocks Marlin’s fear, born of genuine loss, and it never suggests that Nemo is simply right. Both have to grow, and the film’s resolution, with Marlin finally letting Nemo go back to school and swim away, is deeply moving for parents and children alike.

The theme has universal appeal, and it’s one reason the film has become a family favorite across generations. Children see themselves in Nemo, and parents see themselves, sometimes uncomfortably, in Marlin. It’s a rare family film that speaks to both generations about the same experience from opposite sides.

Andrew Stanton

Andrew Stanton directed the film, co-directed by Lee Unkrich, and it came out in May 2003. Stanton also co-wrote it and voiced Crush, and he later directed WALL-E and Finding Dory. He has said the idea came partly from his own experience as an overprotective father. That personal root gives the story its emotional truth.

Finding Nemo was a huge success, becoming for a time the highest-grossing animated film ever made, and it took the Oscar for best animated feature, Pixar’s first win in that category. It was re-released in 3D in 2012 and followed by Finding Dory in 2016. The sequel shifted the focus to Dory’s own story.

Pixar’s Golden Age

Finding Nemo arrived in the middle of Pixar’s greatest run, after Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc., and just before The Incredibles and Ratatouille. The studio was producing one landmark after another, and each film pushed both the technology and the storytelling further than the last.

Nemo’s leap was the ocean itself. Water, light and movement had been notoriously hard to animate convincingly, and the film’s success showed that computer animation could create whole natural worlds with beauty and emotional texture. It raised the bar for every animated film that followed, and it cemented Pixar’s reputation as the most consistently inventive studio in the medium.

Beauty, Wit and Feeling

Finding Nemo balances comedy and emotion, adventure and character, spectacle and intimacy with rare skill. Every scene serves the story, every character is memorable, and the humour works for adults as well as children. It’s thrilling without being too frightening, sad without being morbid and funny without ever undercutting its heart. Its tone is perfectly judged from the first scene to the last.

It’s a 10. Few animated films have matched its combination of beauty, wit and feeling, and it remains one of the high points of Pixar’s golden age, and of animation as a whole. It’s the kind of film children grow up with and then rediscover as parents, finding a different story in it the second time.

Craft Note

The Verdict on Finding Nemo

Finding Nemo is a 10: funny, thrilling, beautiful and deeply moving, a story about a father learning to let go set in the most gorgeous ocean animation had ever seen. This is a masterpiece for every age, and one of Pixar’s very best.

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