Word: pixar
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FISH TALE With its dazzling undersea adventure Finding Nemo, Pixar proves once again that digital cartoons are the wave of the future...
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...
...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 need a battleship...
...these seraphic-faced artists are working stiffs and parents too. The Toy Story tandem and A Bug's Life were clever parables of workplace camaraderie. And the two most recent Pixar films are stories of not-quite-mature men (in the guise of monsters or clown fish) who learn the onerous joys of fatherhood. Like many classic Disney cartoons, and Spielberg fables, Finding Nemo is about the traumatic separation of a child from his parent. The refreshing difference here is that Nemo dramatizes the anxiety (and adventures) a parent undergoes searching for his wayward, precious...
...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...