Word: marlins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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They're only toys: cuddly cloth cowboys, adorable insects, furry monsters. But when the pixilated storytellers at Pixar fashion them, these playthings come to life. Take Marlin, the single-dad clown fish, voiced by Albert Brooks, in the new Pixar astonishment Finding Nemo. Brooks says that when a reporter on a junket described this fish father as overprotective, "I stood up and said, 'Overprotective? If your wife and almost all your children were eaten by a shark, you wouldn't be overprotective?' Then I realized--I'm yelling about a fish...
...course, Marlin is not even a fish. He's a computer-generated image attached to a famously fretful voice. But Marlin has all-too-human qualities: insecurity, suspiciousness, giant wrinkles of worry and a lot of saving heart. Endearing flaws like these, along with an unmatched graphic elegance and elfin wit, have made Pixar's first four features--Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc.--the gold standard in computer-generated imagination. Gold, as in $1.73 billion worldwide gross for that quartet, plus truckfuls more in video and DVD profits. Pixar owner Steve Jobs will...
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...