Word: marline
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Long before Nemo comes along, Marlin is a fussy little anxiety machine. When he learns he's to be a father--of 400 baby clown fish--he fidgets: "What if they don't like me?" But he's right to be concerned for his brood in the fish-eat-fish world of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. A shark devours Marlin's wife and 399 of her eggs. That leaves little Nemo (Alexander Gould)--the one survivor, handicapped with an underdeveloped fin--and Marlin, burdened with an overdeveloped sense of dread. When Nemo is old enough for fish school...
...Marlin, who must now conquer his own fear of the great wet world, that "swirling vortex of terror," has a companion in his search: Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), a blue tang with a sunny disposition and a short-term memory problem. In their hunt for Nemo, they are aided and threatened by all manner of sea creatures: a menacing anglerfish, some not entirely trustworthy members of Sharks Anonymous, a school of shocking jellyfish and a family of surfer-dude sea turtles. In captivity, Nemo finds his own friends: Peach, the starfish (Allison Janney), and the tank commander Gill (Willem Dafoe...
...they meant to be this gorgeous. Nemo, with its ravishing underwater fantasia, manages to trump the design glamour of earlier Pixar films. The dramatic set pieces--Marlin and Dory eluding jellyfish stings, Nemo's claustrophobic panic in a plastic bag--are realized with assured energy and balanced by a dozen deft comic performances, notably those of DeGeneres and Stanton himself as the lead sea turtle. Nemo has artistic and political resonances galore: it alludes to favorite movies, from Pinocchio to Psycho, and fearlessly takes on the powerful pet-shop and aquarium lobbies. There is also the secret insignia...
...reflection of the parent. They become obsessive and anxious over that, whether it is the child's ability to read or the way they walk. This movie says there is no perfect kid; there is no perfect father." And no guarantee that parents will ever have the answers. When Marlin asks the sea turtle Crush how a father knows when his kids are ready to swim out on their own, the wise old dude replies, "Well, you never really know. But when they know, you know--y' know?" Finding Nemo is about feeling one's way to knowing...
...privy to, and they've been living with this for years," says Dafoe, a grizzled delight as the fish-tank lifer who masterminds Nemo's escape from alkaline. "So you just have to give over and trust them." Or, as Brooks puts it, with a fatalism that is totally Marlin, totally Albert: "You hope it's going to work, and you think, If it doesn't work, I'd rather fail with them." For Brooks, there was one reason to take the role: "'Cause I have a 4 1/2-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl. Period." If they like...