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Welcome a brand new children’s classic. Finding Nemo employs extraordinary imagination and animation to tell a story that children of all ages can love. Although this is a totally imaginary world created beneath the ocean waves, the characters become very real to the audience, thanks to the father son relationship that forms the basis for the search for the child Nemo.
At the start, we are immersed in a colorful and wildly diverse paradise of sea creatures on a coral reef where a clownfish, Marlin, and his wife have found the perfect home and happily await the hatching of their 400 “children.” But danger lurks in these deeps, and in a flash Marlin and one egg, named Nemo, are the sole survivors of a barracuda attack.
When the first day of school comes for Nemo, his fiercely protective father does not want to let him go. When finally he does relent, Nemo dashes off in a moment of rebellion and is snatched by humans, ending up in a fish tank in the office of a Sydney, Australia, dentist. There another delightful set of fish characters becomes part of the drama.
Back on the reef, Marlin is desperate to find his son. He is joined in his search by a ditsy blue fish named Dory with short-term memory loss, which helps support her eternal optimism. Their destination is based on a name and a Sydney address inked on a pair of goggles that the snorkelers had dropped.
To achieve their goal Marlin and Dory must survive a trio of sharks, an abandoned shipwreck surrounded by mines, a seductive monster fish, a whale and a forest of deadly jellyfish. They are assisted by a school of sea turtles surfing the Eastern Australian Current, but must escape an attack of seagulls before reaching their Sydney Harbor destination. There Marlin’s unstoppable paternal love becomes a legend in the underwater rumor mill.
Finding Nemo is a lively, exciting adventure filled with laughs targeted not only at children but also at adults (as when using a musical phrase lifted from the movie Psycho to signal approaching danger). Another example: The three sharks that seize Marlin and Dory are members of a self-help group formed to overcome their compulsion to eat fish. Their mantra is “Fish are friends, not food.”
The adventures of Marlin and Dory are intercut with the life-threatening danger now faced in the fish tank by Nemo, who believes that his father will not be coming to rescue him. Under the tutelage of the tough tank leader, Gill, Nemo becomes self-empowered and courageous, enginerring his own escape.
Finding Nemo carries uplifting messages for both children and their parents: finding the balance between caution and courage, between protecting and empowering, and the different gifts afforded by diversity.
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