Pixar’s sixth feature was also their first about human beings, though the Parrs are anything but ordinary. Mr Incredible and Frozone Photograph: Moviestore collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo Meanwhile, it challenged Pixar animators to be meticulous with the ways light moves, reflects and gets lost in water, which made way for a visual grace that was breathtakingly new. Finding Nemo has the talking wildlife, the death of a parent trope and sincere emotional weight buoyed with fun, laughter and wonder.
#FINDING NEMO FISH TOYS MOVIE#
The 2003 movie felt like Pixar’s coming-of-age, the point when the young studio behind Toy Story and A Bug’s Life took their computer animation to new depths while hewing closer to classic Disney storytelling. I’m not saying Finding Nemo is The Godfather Part II of animation. And then a gently moving pan reveals the layers of glass between freedom and Nemo’s captivity in a dentist’s fish tank. The eponymous clownfish sees his reflection across the Sydney skyline in the same way that a young Vito Corleone saw himself alongside the Statue of Liberty in The Godfather Part II. The shot arrives at the midway point during the joyous, comical and thrilling adventure, about a daddy clown fish (Albert Brooks) on a desperate intercontinental search for his stolen child.
Jesse Hassenger Finding Nemoīefore he started toying with Kubrick references and alienated Antonioni-esque perspectives in Wall-E, director Andrew Stanton got me in my feelings with a shot in Finding Nemo that flexes his old-school sense of framing. Toy Story 2 gives the company’s engineering a flawless, fittingly plastic gleam.
In some later Pixar movies, the machinery behind the laughter and tears gets noisier and more obvious. On top of its enviable joke hit rate and set pieces, Jessie the Cowgirl’s lament (accompanied by the heartbreaking song When She Loved Me) covers some Toy Story 3 emotional ground with Up-like concision. Its rescue-mission plot, with Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) leading a group of fellow toys on a mission to help Woody (Tom Hanks), who contemplates a possible life after Andy, is endlessly inventive, maximizing the comic thrill out of simple ideas like “the toys visit a toy store” and “the toys drive a car”. But for sheer feel-great entertainment, I’ve always preferred the second entry. The original gets credit for firsties, while the end of Toy Story 3 inspired a flood of millennial weeping. Though it was universally hailed upon its 1999 release, Toy Story 2 seems to have gotten lost in both the volume of great Pixar movies and the consistency of the Toy Story series. Woody and Jessie Photograph: Walt Disney/Pixar/Sportsphoto/Allstar But it’s the cheerful human-scale drama of Toy Story that stays with me, and one I’d happily watch again and again. As Pixar’s films may have got more conceptually and thematically elaborate – your Inside Outs, your Wall-Es, your Souls – they have certainly probed depths that no mainstream American animated film did before. Toy Story also arrived at the dawn of the kidult era, and played a large part in defining its style: a mournful nostalgia for a boomer childhood wrapped up in frenetic, kid-friendly camerawork.
Gone were the days of pen and ink, or the sense of something actually happening in front of the camera the era of software-generated fantasy cinema was upon us. The first fully computer-animated film, its candy-coloured visuals simultaneously represented a new dawn and a vision of the future, in animation itself and in film-making more widely. For all their later successes, there’s still nothing in the Pixar catalogue that matches the dopamine hit of their very first feature.