Finding Nemo

Marlin the clownfish is happily married, has moved into a new house and is about to become a new father. He worries whether he will be a good one. However, before his eggs hatch, a large predatory fish attacks, and when Marlin wakes up his wife and all his eggs are gone except one. Grieving, Marlin promises his last surviving child, Nemo, that he won’t let anything bad happen to him. Marlin is deeply wounded from his loss and has become fearful and risk-averse because he doesn’t want to get hurt again. He smothers his young son, Nemo, who resents that his father’s fearful nature is holding him back from living his life. Nemo rebels against his overprotective father by swimming out toward a boat, and a human SCUBA diver takes him away. In order to find his missing son and bring him back home, Marlin must swim out into the open ocean to follow him, and by swimming out into the open ocean, Marlin must also face his fears of being eaten by predators.

On his journey, the fearful yet urgently rushing Marlin is accompanied by Dory, a blue tang who is scatterbrained yet cheerful to a fault. Her forgetful nature makes her ditzy. Unlike Marlin, who is still nursing his wounds, Dory approaches everything like a curious child who has never seen anything before and doesn’t understand why any of it might be dangerous. Even when she gets hurt, she quickly forgets about her pain and goes on swimming. Among other things, Dory unexpectedly knows how to read despite the fact that fish don’t write, which gives Marlin a lead where he should go to search for Nemo. Because Dory is his complete opposite, Marlin often gets frustrated with Dory and doesn’t want her following him, yet he also grows to care about her enough to start acting like a father to her and keep her out of harm’s way. Dory also grows attached to Marlin; when Marlin tries to send her away, she admits that she’s always been forgetful and she used to feel lost, but when she’s with Marlin she remembers things more because he has given her a sense of belonging.

Meanwhile, in a dentist’s office in Sydney, Australia, Nemo is trapped in a fish tank, and he has to escape soon because in a matter of days the dentist intends to gift Nemo to his hyperactive niece who will surely cause him to die. The fish he meets in the tank all want him to succeed in escaping back into the ocean where he belongs and with a little tough love, Nemo is made to prove that he’s not a victim in spite of his “lucky fin” and he’s plenty capable of getting the job done.

Finding Nemo is all about facing fears and not letting them hold you back. The movie doesn’t suggest that Marlin’s fears are unwarranted; it’s a big ocean and there are a lot of predators and real dangers out there. However, being a fully functioning adult doesn’t mean you don’t feel fear. You simply learn to understand what the danger is and figure out ways to navigate through it safely. Marlin gets swept up in a lot of perilous situations that he would have never chosen to enter on his own, and even though he’s not exactly a fish of action, he forces himself to confront it because the love of his son is greater than his fears. He actually musters enough courage and resourcefulness to face danger and other sea creatures start admiring him for blowing up sharks with sea mines, diving into a dark abyss and wrangling an anglerfish and bouncing through a cloud of jellyfish, and Marlin doesn’t even realize that what he’s done is incredibly brave.

There is an element of faith in Marlin and Nemo’s respective journeys. Marlin confronts creatures that he thinks might want to eat him, but they actually want to help him, and he doesn’t know he can trust them until he chooses to trust them. Nemo is also trying to build his own confidence in his trials crossing the Ring of Fire and evading the tank filter; he doesn’t know for certain if he can do it until after he’s actually done it, and it gets easier for him to succeed when he doesn’t hesitate due to fear. Having a father-to-father talk with the sea turtle Crush, Marlin asks Crush how he knows when his children are ready to face the world on their own, and Crush tells him that when they’re ready, they’ll know and he’ll know, too. And at the end, when Dory is in trouble, Nemo has learned a trick back in the tank that he believes will save her, but it means putting himself in danger. He tells his father that in order for him to save Dory, Marlin must trust him absolutely.

By the time the movie is over, Marlin has regained his confidence and is ready to face the world again without being fearful and hesitant. He no longer feels the need to overprotect his son Nemo; he just encourages his son to go out and have adventures.

A few things to add:

When Marlin tells the sharks his son Nemo was kidnapped by a human, the sharks say “Humans, they think they own everything! Probably American”. [Australian, actually]. I think Pixar was just doing some good natured ribbing at the time the film was made and didn’t mean it, but decades later anti-human sentiment in the film industry has increased significantly. The very idea of sharks being nice is a comical inversion of expectations. The sharks genuinely do want to be friendly and helpful, but the movie makes it clear that sharks choosing not to eat fish requires a great deal of restraint on their part.

When Marlin doesn’t want to talk to a mysterious fishy figure in the distance to ask where he should be going, Dory recites the cliché joke “What is it with men not asking for directions?” Marlin responds that he doesn’t want to play the gender card; he just doesn’t trust creatures he doesn’t know anything about because they might eat him.

One theme in this movie is “all drains lead to the ocean”. The movie shows Nemo swim through a sewer pipe, enter a sewage treatment machine, and safely exit through an underwater pipe below a buoy reading “treated sewage”. It’s a simple enough idea for a cartoon movie, but real life is more complicated. For one, raw sewage contains a lot of nasty things such as chemicals, bacteria and parasites, and sewage treatment plants use some pretty aggressive methods to filter out solid waste and chemically treat water before it’s safe to reintroduce into the environment without polluting it. In reality, it’s unlikely that Nemo would have survived that trip. I wouldn’t recommend taking a swim through a sewer unless you were an unusually hardy creature like a rat and the sewer was wide and spacious like the world-famous sewers in Paris, France.