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This time around, Pixar's given us an underwater adventure revolving around a pair of fish and their quest to find their missing child (also a fish). As they seem to in all animated movies, the animals talk as if their entire lexicon was composed of sassy one-liners. Although the trailer never shows this, I'm also guessing they occasionally break into song, probably as written by a past-his-prime rock musician looking to secure enough funds to settle a palimony lawsuit. My first thoughts upon watching the Finding Nemo trailer were:
There seems to be this amusing ongoing struggle in Hollywood to create photo-realistic computer-animated everything. Hair, water, skin, leaves, smoke — even the minute nuances of human facial expression — are all being replicated with pixels. My theory is that filmmakers have finally gotten so sick of dealing with temperamental actors that they're secretly trying to turn acting into yet another perfectly controllable special effect (as evidenced by Industrial Light & Magic's just-released Val Kilmer ActorPro 2.1). The problem is, the technology's just not there yet — and while it'll no doubt get there eventually, it's unsettling having to watch films where the kinks haven't been fully ironed out yet. When I watch computer-animated human characters, the creepiest thing for me is the eerie plasticity of their faces, like they've just bobbed for apples in non-corrosive epoxy coating. But the truly eerie thing is that they don't actually look all that different from Michael Jackson, Cher, or any number of formerly beautiful performers who traded in their normal human faces for a shot at physical immortality. In other words, the future of Hollywood film is that all movies will look like they star Cher. Clearly someone needs to say something before this goes too far. But this isn't to condemn all computer animation. Like any other aspect of filmmaking, animation is a tool that can be used for good (The Simpsons, The Secret of Nimh) or evil (anything featuring Rugs and/or Rats). Overall, I've enjoyed Pixar's films so far, and Toy Story in particular. Their films seem smarter, more playful, and at the same time less clownishly ethnocentric than most of Disney's recent traditionally animated films. They aren't as good as, say, pornography. But they sure beat the gruel Disney ladles out every year. But I'm straying — let's get back to pornography. The idea of porno makes sense to me. Pictures of people having sex? Yes, sign me up. But then the reality of pornography always spoils it. They're still pictures of people having sex, sure, but they're all creepy-looking, physically-distorted people having mechanical sex without any sense of genuine passion. It's depressing. Arousing, certainly. But depressing. Likewise with children's animation. In kids films, ropey strangers have creepy-looking sex all the time. No, wait — that wasn't my point. Ah, here it is: animated kid films are ostensibly a cinematic form where any idea can be brought to life, no matter how fantastic or strange. Love the concept. Except most animated kid's films are utter crap. Rather than charging up the childhood imagination, the typical animated film is a stultifying collage of tired cliché, bland style, spiritless plot contortions, and flatly uninspiring morality. I'm excluding anime from the above value judgment. Animated movies about 50-foot laser-spewing demon-vaginas attacking feudal towns populated exclusively by rocketboot-wearing ninja schoolgirls occupy, in my opinion, their own inviolable niche in the animated spectrum. Nor will I include Richard Linklater's brilliant Waking Life in my indictment (the exclusion of which from last year's inaugural Oscar for Best Animated Film was a travesty along the lines of excluding Catherine Zeta-Jones from the Most Famous Actress Lauded For Her Beauty But Who Actually Sorta Looks Like a Transvestite Award).
The animation in the trailer looks impressively fluid, which is a good thing, since it takes place underwater. With some lovely opening images of life below-the-waves, Finding Nemo shows off a grace and subtlety that makes The Little Mermaid look like the crude etchings of a trained bear. Good stuff so far. But then, as the narrator exhorts us to "embark on an adventure as big as the ocean itself," it starts to falter. We're bombarded with the usual animated antics, like animals that have been anthropomorphized into familiar human clichés. A turtle that talks with a surfer accent is not, to me, pushing forward the artform. The basic story — a naive optimistic fish teams up with a neurotic pessimistic fish to find the pessimistic fish's missing son — seems straightforward enough, but all the zaniness started to grate on me after only a minute. I guess I'm about twenty years outside the film's target demographic, but the marketing angle of the trailer put me off a film I'm actually predisposed to want to see. Rather than an intriguing and hilarious premise, like a child's toy collection coming to life in his absence, or a factory run by monsters whose civilization is fueled by children's screams, Finding Nemo is being sold as a typical kid's adventure flick. Maybe there's an ingenious concept hiding behind the uninspiring marketing, but it's not in evidence in this rather dull trailer. Ultimately, Pixar's keeping afloat on enough goodwill from the Toy Story movies that I'm willing to check out their underwater epic. But after seeing the trailer, my enthusiasm has unfortunately sunk well below sea level.
RATING:
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Finding
Nemo is the latest computer-animated kid's movie from Pixar —
the production company that, to date, has made Toy Story (a story
about toys); Toy Story 2 (another story about toys); A Bug's
Life (adapted from a Franz Kafka short story); Monsters Inc.
(a gruesome horror film about monsters raising venture capital and registering
their IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission); and, of course,
its sequel Models Inc. (far more chilling for entirely different
reasons).
No,
I'm talking about Hollywood-produced mainstream animated children's
movies. And Pixar has so far managed to distinguish themselves from
this lot, making some of the few truly memorable animated kid's films
of the last decade. More importantly, they've done so while pushing
forward the art form of computer animation. Because of this, I want
to like Finding Nemo.