Finding Nemo

[yendi]

shadesong and I decided to catch this yesterday afternoon.

I'm still blown away by it.

This is the movie that Pixar has been building towards all these years. The Toy Story films are fun, but far from perfect. Monsters Inc, although something I adored, just never managed to work on the adult level for me. It's a great kid's film, but it just lacked a little bit. But this was fucking perfect, on every level.

I'm a sucker for any sort of fatherhood movie, of course. Both as a father, and as someone who grew up without one, it's a theme that can get to me in almost any film. But that's not all that makes this a good flick.

It's perfectly cast. From Albert Brooks as Marlin, all the way down to minor appearances by John Ratzenberger (as a manta ray) and Erik Per Sullivan (as a squid with a mild ink problem), every fucking voice is perfect. The lobsters have New England accents. The turtles are all surfer dudes stright out of a Keanu Reeves festival. There are characters played by Erik Bana, Willem Dafoe, Vicki Lewis, and Allison Janney, all doing a great job.

And the characters! This the most realized ensemble ever put together in an animated picture. Sure, the leads (neurotic Marlin, ditzy Dory, and cute Nemo) are wonderful, and given a huge amount of depth (amazingly so, given how easy it would be to leave them all as the one-note characters, especially Ellen DeGeneres's Dory, whose memory-challenged character becomes so much more touching than the typical comic relief sidekick). But the minor characters are every bit as realized. The father-figure feelings of Dafoe's Gil towards Nemo; the love that Coral and Marlin feel towards each other; the love Crush feels towards his kids. It's all there.

You don't just get that with good voice actors. You don't even get there with a great screenplay and direction. You also need great animation. And this film has it. In spades. This is a truly gorgeous film. But never overwhelmingly so -- you're never forced sit up and take notice of how detailed the animation is at the expense of the plot. Instead, this movie immerses you in the undersea world, and for two hours, you're under the water, just like Marlin himself.

The jokes work for everyone, from the usual slapstick for the kids, to little references that only adults could possibly get (without ever making the movie inaccessible for the young ones). They're perfectly woven into the plot, too.

The highest praise I could give this movie? It's as good as a Miyazaki film.

I need some good Nemo icons.

Anyway, off to a meeting and then lunch, then I'll stop posting and start responding to comments.