Word: nemo
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...many ways, behind the screen as well as on it, Nemo is a find-your-inner-grownup story. For a decade, Stanton was pleased to assist--as writer and co-director--the charismatic Lasseter, who created the first Pixar shorts and masterminded the art of CGI storytelling. "We all think John is the best thing since sliced bread," he avers, "and we'll follow his lead anywhere." But Stanton honed and hoarded his Nemo idea before pitching it to his Pixar pals. "Part of it was ego," he acknowledges. "Here I am making these movies with these four or five...
...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...
...Nemo's fish-out-of-water plot was hatched back in 1992, when Stanton visited Marine World in Vallejo, Calif. His feelings of protectiveness toward his own boy Ben (now 10, and the brother of Audrey, 7) inspired the father-son story; a dentist's office fish tank, remembered from his childhood in Rockport, Mass., provided a second location for the drama...
...Nemo's short fin--a deformity that does not slow him down one bit--became, says Stanton, "a metaphor for anything you worry is insufficient or hasn't formed yet in your child. Parents think their child's handicap is a 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...
...even more than usual, the actor becomes a child, striving to please his coaxing, demanding father: the director. "There's so much info you're not 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...