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Walt Disney hates your mom.
They have no great love for parenthood in general, but that's
nothing compared to how much they hate your mom. They despise
the woman who bore you and raised you and loved you and picked
up after you and pretended not to notice when you insisted
on washing your own sheets when you were thirteen years old.
If Disney didn’t hate your mom, why else would they produce
an oeuvre of films solely designed to exploit new ways of
killing her, imprisoning her or both? Not only is she forced
to sit there for an hour and a half while you ask dumb questions
and inevitably stain your clothes with greasy faux-buttered
popcorn, but she's got to view her impending death over and
over again. And do you honestly think that your mom enjoyed
watching The Fox and The Hound? She didn’t.
Pixar CEO Steve Jobs perpetuates this cycle of maternal loathing
with his studio’s latest film "Finding Nemo,"
written and directed by Andrew Stanton. Just as in Cinderella,
Snow White, Bambi, Mulan, The Little
Mermaid, Beauty and The Beast, The Lion King,
and the aforementioned Fox and The Hound, the action
of "Finding Nemo" is instigated by the death or
imprisonment of a main character’s mother.
“But what about 'The Lion King?'" you might ask.
"It was Simba’s father who died, not his
mother.” Okay, that might be true, but you will recall
after he killed Mustafa, Jeremy Irons spent the rest of the
film raping Simba's Mom. And with the exception of Lolita,
nobody likes being raped by Jeremy Irons.
Anyway…
"Finding Nemo" is the wonderful new film produced
by Pixar, the computer animation arm of the Disney octopus.
It tells the story of Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks) a neurotic
clown fish whose wife and 399 children were eaten by a barracuda,
leaving his son Nemo (Alexander Gould) as the sole survivor.
As a result, Marlin becomes a severely overprotective father
who’s not afraid to embarrass Nemo in front of the other
young minnows. After a particularly harsh dressing down, Nemo,
in an act of foolhardy rebellion, swims away from his father,
only to be netted by a deep-sea diver. The sequence that follows,
with Marlin chasing frantically after the speedboat carrying
his son away, is particularly effective. Especially since
none of it would have happened if Nemo had just listened to
his father.
And that’s another thing I learned from watching "Finding
Nemo": your Dad is always right. Are you starting to
see a pattern here?
The rest of the movie follows two story lines: Marlin’s
search throughout the Great Barrier Reef for his missing son,
and Nemo’s attempt to escape from an aquarium in a dentist’s
office. Joining Marlin in his search is Dory (Ellen DeGeneres),
a blue tang who suffers from severe short-term memory loss.
Her affliction, combined with Marlin’s anxiety, makes
for some of the best back-and-forth comedy I’ve seen
since Abbot and Costello. Nemo, meanwhile, is aided in his
attempts to escape by Gill (Willem Dafoe), who sports the
exact same facial scarring as Dafoe’s character did in
Platoon, which is just a small example of the attention to
detail that made this movie so enjoyable.
What really amazed me about "Finding Nemo" was it
made sense. Sure, it's just another cute cartoon about talking
animals, but once you find yourself securely in this rhelm,
it somehow becomes believable. In this world, lobsters speak
with Maine accents, man-eating sharks are Australian and fiddler
crabs know karate. It all made perfect sense.
Of course, I would have enjoyed this film more had I not seen
it during a Saturday matinee next to actual children. They
never shut up. They never stopped asking questions. “Why
is that shark trying to eat them?” “Why did that
whale spit them out?” “What happened to Nemo’s
Mom?”
“She’s dead,” I finally screamed to the small
child. "She’s dead, and she’s never coming
back! The world is a harsh place and you'd better get used
to it!"
The child quieted for a moment. Tears welled up in his eyes.
"Why is the world an evil place?"
"I don't know. Because it is."
"Does the fact that Disney is an evil corporation intent
on controlling the world through unfair labor practices and
the white-washing of non-Western cultures have anything to
do with it?"
"I don't know. Maybe. Watch the movie."
"Who's that?"
"That's Ellen DeGeneres."
"Isn't she a lesbian?"
"Last I heard."
"What's a lesbian?"
"Ask your mother."
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Above:
'Finding Nemo' by Disney and Pixar Animation. Disclaimer:
Fish can't actually talk in real life.
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