The lasting legacy of ‘Finding Nemo’ 20 years on
On this day exactly 20 years ago, Finding Nemo had its first premiere. Prior to this, Pixar Animation Studios had put out four feature films and firmly established itself as a leading figure in the world of animation. Initially a sub-brand of Lucasfilm, the company went independent in 1986 and celebrated its new-found autonomy with the release of Luxo Jr. in 1986, a two-minute short film that made history by being the first CGI movie to be nominated for an Academy Award.
This project also introduced the world to the titular character of Luxo Jr, the playful anthropomorphised lamp that would become the mascot for Pixar and open every single film they would subsequently release. Following their first full feature, the groundbreaking Toy Story in 1995, the studio made A Bug’s Life three years later in 1998, the Toy Story sequel in 1999 and Monsters Inc two years later.
Having successfully rendered toys, humans, insects and monsters with CGI, Pixar had been honing its animation skills and testing the limits of its innovative, in-house technology. They were looking to depict a world that would push them even further, both creatively and technologically. Notoriously difficult to animate, water was something the studio had barely touched upon, and combined with an idea director Andrew Stanton had been working on since post-production on A Bug’s Life, their next film was decided: Finding Nemo.
Set against the backdrop of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the film follows the journey of an anxious and overbearing clownfish, Marlin, played by Albert Brooks. After a hungry barracuda attacks Marlin, his partner Coral, and their many eggs waiting to hatch, Coral and most of their eggs are eaten, and Marlin is left with only one surviving and slightly damaged egg.
Swearing to protect his only son at all costs, Marlin becomes an overly protective and nervous father who refuses to grant his son Nemo any independence and lives in constant fear of something bad happening. When Nemo is subsequently captured by scuba divers, Marlin must embark on an epic journey to reclaim his only son.
Along the way, Marlin meets Dory (played by Ellen DeGeneres), the endearing Blue Tang fish with severe short-term memory loss, and together they travel across the ocean in search of Nemo, encountering a wide variety of marine life characters, including a trio of ‘vegetarian’ sharks, an eagle-ray school teacher and a laid-back surfer turtle.
Nemo, on the other hand, is transported to a fish tank in a Sydney dentist’s waiting room. Here, he meets the ‘Tank Gang’, a tight-knit group of fish led by Gill (Willem Dafoe) who live in terror of being killed by the dentist’s niece. With the help of a friendly visiting Pelican named Nigel, Nemo is able to help the ‘Tank Gang’ stage an escape from the aquarium and is ultimately reunited with his father at long last.
Pixar had already forged its distinct brand of filmmaking: stories for children that nonetheless had a sense of depth and maturity, covered big and important topics, and threw in some jokes to make the parents laugh to boot. The preceding four films all managed to tackle larger themes within the context of an entertaining narrative for a younger audience, but in 2003, Finding Nemo represented the absolute height of storytelling ability and technological proficiency.
Presenting to the audience a beautifully rich, vibrantly coloured and fluidly animated ocean, Pixar also delivered a heartfelt tale about friendship, grief and coming-of-age. The filmmakers managed to spread environmental awareness whilst also delivering an emotionally mature and complex story about a father learning to accept his son’s growth as an individual. Combined with a stellar cast of talented actors who lent their voices to well-written, three-dimensional roles and a hauntingly beautiful score by Thomas Newman, Finding Nemo was an unmitigated smash hit.
Pixar’s fifth film went on to win ‘Best Animated Feature’ at the 76th Academy Awards and proved to be the second-highest-grossing film of 2003. Its theme of endurance and motif of perseverance in the face of adversity resonated with children, adults and the elderly across the world. Dory’s line, “Just keep swimming”, became a mantra, a guiding principle for people to take difficult paths one step at a time.
Whilst Pixar has continued to make gorgeous-looking and well-rounded children’s films, with WALL-E (2008) and Inside Out (2015) being particular highlights, there was something about the time and place of Finding Nemo that resulted in a resounding legacy that still exists today: it is still the top-selling DVD of all time, with over 41,000,000 copies selling worldwide. So what is it about Finding Nemo that, 20 years after, has maintained its status as a cinematic phenomenon?
Above all else, it represented a milestone in computer animation that had yet to be reached and which set the standard for all CGI films, Pixar or otherwise, that came after it. Its technical superiority is illustrated by the films that came immediately after, such as Shrek 2 or the similarly ocean-set Shark Tale, which simply don’t hold up on a visual level to nearly the same degree that Finding Nemo does.
It was the first Pixar film that grew along with its audience, trusting in its younger demographic their capacity to understand and process heavy topics; the very opening of the film shows a father being widowed and losing his unborn children. It deftly navigated between heartfelt comedy, luminescent and kaleidoscopic imagery and a message about taking risks, overcoming fears and evolving as a person.
It had such depth that it spawned fan theories about the true nature of Marlin and Nemo. In a landscape now saturated with countless animated features, including the more recent output from the same studio, Finding Nemo stands strong as a pinnacle of not just children’s cinema, but storytelling in general.
