Pixar and Disney team up again looking for their fifth straight hit in
Finding Nemo, a family comedy that avoids
the toys, the bugs and the monsters and goes much deeper... into the ocean, that is.
Finding Nemo is about Marlon (Albert Brooks), a father fish, who, after losing 199 children and his wife to a deadly creature, loses his remaining son Nemo to a scuba diving dentist. The dentist takes the little clown fish back to his aquarium in his office, preparing to give him away to his psychotic niece, who is known only as a "fish killer." Meanwhile, Marlon sets out with another fish named Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), who has a short-term memory loss problem, to save Nemo.
The interesting thing about Finding Nemo is that it is not as much a comedy as it is a dramatic adventure story. Unlike the other Pixar films, which, most notably, include the two Toy Story films, Finding Nemo is not nearly as funny. Whether its lack of comedy is intentional or not is anybody''s guess, but it is clear that the company has begun to focus more on visual effects than on screenplay. That''s not to say that the screenplay is bad - it has plenty of intermittent moments here and there, and overall the dialogue is very sound - but it isn''t nearly as funny.