A review by Stew.

Ah man, I never thought I'd catch myself saying this about a gay CGI fish movie, but 'Finding Nemo' is really, really good. No, actually, I'd go so far as to say that it's the best film of the year so far. How d'you like them apples?

On what do I base this startling judgement? Well, it's just the most consistently entertaining thing I've seen in a long while, and unlike other consistently entertaining films I've seen recently like, say, 'Buffalo Soldiers', caused me to grin like a big ol' goofball for 100 minutes rather than simply reinforced my long-held belief that the world is full of fucking arseholes. No, I now believe that the world is full of talking fish instead. Hmm.

Story - well, I'm kind of running late today, so here's something I just nicked off www.imdb.com from some dude calling him/herself 'The Unemployed Critic':

"After the tragic loss of his wife and all but one of his children, neurotic (and deeply unfunny) clownfish, Marlin (Albert Brooks), clings mightily to his only surviving son, Nemo (Alexander Gould, `They'). Fiercely protective of his child, Marlin watches over everything Nemo does, even taking him out of his first day at school due to potential dangers. Nemo rejects his father's overprotective nature, and while attempting to swim out into the dark and bottomless section of the ocean on a dare, he is captured by some deep sea divers and taken to live in a dentist's office fish tank. Nemo's disappearance leaves Marlin delirious with fear, swimming out into the great unknown to search for his son. Luckily, he finds help in a memory-impaired fish named Dory (Ellen DeGeneres). Together they battle sharks and jellyfish, ride with turtles, and try to escape whales as they search for the little lost fish named Nemo."

Yep. What he said. I didn't just nick the rest of the review however, as this, well, this fucking idiot thinks that 'Finding Nemo' is Pixar's first creative failure, lacking the oompf of 'Toy Story' 1 and 2 and 'Monsters Inc.'. Well, hey, everybody's entitled to their opinion, but in this instance they're completely wrong. I thought the 'Toy Story' movies were very entertaining, but 'Monsters Inc.' was woefully thin by comparison, whereas 'Finding Nemo' surpasses them all. I was in an auditorium of 50/50 adults and kids, and there was not one moment when every single person wasn't rapt by the movie, (even the little shitbags who, prior to the film, had been kicking the back of my seat and would frankly have borne by no-time-for-crime wrath had their mom/babysitter/guardian not been with them - much as I'm not afraid to put the shits up small children, I do tend to avoid violent confrontation with hot 30-year-old women when at all possible. Unless it's some kind of sexy violent confrontation like in a Japanese movie, where we both shoot at each other in slow motion then get it on while some pigeons fly past. But those occasions are few and far between, I think you'll be surprised to hear…)

'Finding Nemo's strongest point is its script; sure the CGI is amazing, blah blah blah, but at the end of the day, the script is genuinely funny and clever enough to more than adequately reward parents dragged along by their nippers. It's a shame that the audience at large might consider this a kid's movies, as it really is genuinely sophisticated humour; the surf-dude turtles and fish-friendly Shark-a-holics are pitched at a level that kids will respond to, but adults will void their bowels laughing at, getting all of the references. And when its not particularly sophisticated, the humour's just gleefully ridiculous, (such as the Australian seagulls whose sole means of communication is the word 'mate'; yep, never comes across in translation, but trust me, when you see the film you'll piss yourself laughing). Despite the fact its about a papa fish trying to find his lil' baby, I can assure you, it never descends into mawkish 'growing as a person' territory. Or even 'growing as a fish' territory. The fact that the main fish Marlin's piscine wife and (literally hundreds) of egg-kids are wiped out in the opening three minutes isn't used as a full-on tear-jerker is particularly neat; there are no life-lessons overly-stressed (which is where it beats out the 'Toy Story' flicks for me - always felt the 'message' of these movies was a little ham-fisted); the sole moment of 'ick' dialogue is even handled amusingly - when the 'memory-impaired' fish Dory tells Marlin that he 'completes her' in an effort to get him to stay around, she just forgets she ever said it thirty seconds later, and he fucks off anyway, leaving her on her own.

The parallel plotline of little Nemo himself 'imprisoned' in a dentist's waiting room fish-tank alongside a bunch of other exotic fish, (led by 'Gil', voiced with aplomb by Willem Dafoe), is packed with enough gags and quality performances to have filled a film by itself. To slip into Ultra-Ponce mode for a moment, 'Finding Nemo' truly is an embarrassment of riches.

Look, just go and see the film, okay? Don't even bother dragging a kid with you as an excuse - just go. Take a chick! Take a dude! Take a fucking Labrador for all I care, just go and see it. You'd have to be one hard-hearted bastard not to be transported into A Magical Place by it. If you're a bloke, however, just make sure you don't go on your own, as the only Magical Place a single man hanging around in a darkened room full of small children can expect to find himself if he's not careful is The Nonce Wing of the local slammer…