We Love Pixar: What I Learned From 'Finding Nemo'

Pixar’s Finding Nemo is easily the darkest of the films.

Marlin, a clownfish, starts off promising his wife, Coral, the whole ocean:

Marlin: So, Coral, when you said you wanted an ocean view, you didn’t think you were going to get the whole ocean, did you? Huh?

Marlin: Oh, yeah. A fish can breathe out here. Did your man deliver, or did he deliver?

Coral: My man delivered.

Marlin: And it wasn’t so easy.

Coral: Because a lot of other clownfish had their eyes on this place.

Like many couples in love, they name their future children, without considering that life sometimes has other plans. Pixar treats these middle class dreams seriously, though, and that’s what makes the next scene all the more tragic. The very dream of giving his future children the gift of an inexhaustible horizon cuts short Coral’s life and that of most of his children when a barracuda eats them.

Marlin, knocked out by the barracuda, is powerless to save his family. He finds just one egg and promises the impossible: “I promise I will never let anything happen to you.”

The problem, though, is that children were meant to do things. They were meant to go to school and to become full members of the community.

Promising that nothing will happen means that everything is a potential enemy – and that, at least, is exactly where Marlin finds himself. Compounding his neurosis is that his son, Nemo, was born with a “bad flipper” that makes swimming tough. The ocean, as our world, is constantly in flux – and dangerous. Andrew Stanton put it best in an interview with National Geographic: “I know it’s precarious out there.”

And precarious it is! Nemo, as Icarus didn’t heed Daedalus’s calls, journeys out to that very ocean toward a boat – and winds up in an aquarium in an Australian dentist’s office, miles from home and Marlin, of course, resolves to find him before he goes once and for all, off to the dentist’s niece, never to be heard from again.

For conservatives, again, we find that Pixar shares our values, even if it isn’t as full-throated as we would like. Indeed, its quiet articulation is the best kind of sedition.

There’s the love of a father. In an era in which paternal rights are akin to hate speech and when “choice mom” has entered the lexicon, the idea that a single father would travel 20,000 leagues to rescue his son might seem alien. Mothers, we know from nature, will die for their cubs. (Witness the rise of Palin’s Momma grizzlies.) But fathers trying to help their children? How retrograde in our era of no-fault divorces, how insulting. How. Dare. Pixar!

There’s the love of sacrifice, best exemplified by the kind of Great Escape ethos permeating the aquarium. Gill, voiced by the magnificent Willem DaFoe, gives up his chance at rescue by helping Nemo reunite with his father.

Finally, there’s the perseverance. Nemo works to save himself by clogging up the filter with a pebble. He’s nobody’s cripple. His weak fin, though an obstacle, doesn’t stop him from living the good life. The fish of the aquarium tank expect the best of him. There’s no ADA condescension in the fish tank. Meanwhile, Marlin, battles jellyfish, sharks, and whales to see his son again. The love a father knows for his son keeps him going, even when all seems lost.

Abraham Lincoln once said:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

Finding Nemo said it simpler. “Just keep swimming.”