Disney Pixar's fifth feature film dazzles us with brilliantly colored and intricately detailed panoramic views of the coral gardens of the Great Barrier Reef, and we get to meet a number of engaging and memorable characters, in particular the anxiously overprotective clownfish father Marlin (Albert Brooks) who must overcome his own timidity in order to rescue his son Nemo, the sweetly addlepated blue tang Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) who befriends Marlin and inadvertently complicates his quest with her memory-loss confusions, the laid-back surfer-dude sea turtle Crush (Andrew Stanton) who teaches Marlin that fathers need to give their sons a chance to take risks, the scarred but unbroken Moorish idol Gill (Willem Dafoe) who serves as Nemo's surrogate father and instructor in jailbreak techniques when he's imprisoned in a dentist's aquarium, and the toothy great white Bruce (Barry Humphries), the leader of a trio of sharks who have forsworn their addiction to fish flesh in an underwater parody of Alcoholics Anonymous, but unfortunately FINDING NEMO also features the fart-and-burp "humor" now obligatory in all Hollywood films, not to mention a tired resurrection of the least original dentist jokes imaginable, jokes that were already hopelessly stale and clichéd fifty years ago, and then there's a final test of Nemo's courage that is so artificially contrived and extraneous to the main line of the plot that it must have been impulsively tacked on as an afterthought, and perhaps the most regrettable shortcoming of all is the circumspect understatement of tragic sentiment, a tactic  that diminishes the dramatic force of the entire film, for if Coral, the mother clownfish, had been allowed to sing just one tender lullaby to Nemo and her other eggs before she gets munched, then everything that follows would have been charged with a greater emotional urgency, but of course the boys at the Disney Pixar studio are much too hip, cool, and sophisticated to do anything that might appear overly maudlin, anything that might actually move little kids to sob with grief the way whole audiences did sixty years ago when they saw BAMBI.

 
Finding Nemo
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