Finding Nemo

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

You could trawl the seven seas and not net a funnier, more beautiful, and more original work of art and comedy than Finding Nemo.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

This time the dad is the hero of the story, although in most animation it is almost always the mother.

Chicago Tribune Mark Caro

Finding Nemo and its Pixar predecessors tap into the shared gene among the kids and adults that delights in imagination-engaging, eye-tickling and wit-filled storytelling. You connect to these sea creatures as you rarely do with humans in big-screen adventures. The result: a true sunken treasure.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Summer hasn't even started, but you won't likely find a better catch this season than Finding Nemo, a dazzling, computer-animated fish tale with a funny, touching script and wonderful voice performances that make it an unqualified treat for all ages.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

It has what the most heartfelt Disney animated features used to have: rapturous imagery matched with real wit.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

I don't think we're going to see a better--a funnier or more genuinely heartwarming, for that matter--comedy this year.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Pixar's employees, masters of computer-generated animation, capture the look of the ocean like no artists before.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

The movie's generosity of spirit and artistry swamps its flaws.

San Francisco Chronicle C.W. Nevius

The visuals pop, the fish emote and the ocean comes alive. That's in the first two minutes. After that, they do some really cool stuff.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It's the filmmakers' refusal to sugarcoat their tale's darker subtexts that makes Finding Nemo such a resounding piece of storytelling.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

The great joy of watching a Pixar production is how it rewards not only younger viewers but their older companions as well.

LA Weekly Hazel-Dawn Dumpert

On a purely visual level, Finding Nemo is as gorgeous a film as Disney's ever put out, with astonishing qualities of light, movement, surface and color at the service of the best professional imaginations money can buy.

The Hollywood Reporter Sheri Linden

An exhilarating fish story in the perfectly cast comic adventure.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

May be a fish tale, but its story of the paradox of love -- knowing when to hold on means knowing when to let go -- is profoundly humane and human.

Slate David Edelstein

Of all the great vocal characterizations...the showstopper is Brooks, who hasn't had a part this good since "Lost in America" (1985). His Marlin is tender, cranky, hysterical, yet somehow lucid.

Chicago Reader Andrew Stanton

Aquatic joyride.

Time Richard Corliss

Nemo, with its ravishing underwater fantasia, manages to trump the design glamour of earlier Pixar films.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

The humor bubbling through Finding Nemo is so fresh, sure of itself and devoid of the cutesy, saccharine condescension that drips through so many family comedies that you have to wonder what it is about the Pixar technology that inspires the creators to be so endlessly inventive.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

An undersea treasure all the same, and a prodigy of visual energy.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Pixar's Finding Nemo may well have the best casting of any animated film of the past 30-odd years.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

This stirring children's movie about separation anxiety is swimming with comic references only adults will catch, thus greatly expanding the potential audience.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Leave it to a g-rated cartoon to give the live-action epics a lesson in action, fun and bracing originality.

USA Today Claudia Puig

The most gorgeous of all the Pixar films — which include "Toy Story" 1 and 2, "A Bug's Life" and "Monsters, Inc." —Nemo treats family audiences to a sweet, resonant story and breathtaking visuals.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Ray Conlogue

Though the Disney logo is on this movie, there is -- possibly excepting little Nemo himself -- not a single cloying, sentimental Disneyesque creature in it. There is, instead, wit and flair in concept and writing, the trademark of the Pixar people who drove the project.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Pixar is so good at what it does that every other kiddie-entertainment purveyor -- including parent company Disney -- flounders in comparison.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

As always, the voice casting is perfect. Throw in a moral, and some nice touches of technical accuracy (that fish keepers will appreciate), and the movie represents the best family film to-date of 2003.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Dazzles us with computer-generated animation that has never looked quite so boldly exotic or shimmeringly beautiful.

Village Voice Ed Park

Stuffed to the gills with surprises.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

What's more impressive, and in the end more important, is the high standard of storytelling that Pixar continues to meet by locating both humor and emotional depth in worlds created out of lines of code.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Very clever and imaginative indeed, and its pictures are so gorgeous that they alone could warrant a second viewing.

Dallas Observer Bill Gallo

The whole thing is absolutely beautiful to look at, even when it has a bad case of the cutes.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

The best break of all is that Pixar's traditionally untethered imagination can't be kept under wraps forever, and "Nemo" erupts with sea creatures that showcase Stanton and company's gift for character and peerless eye for skewering contemporary culture.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Though not as great as "Toy Story 2" and "Monsters, Inc.," Pixar movies that are the gold standard for family movies, Finding Nemo is visually entrancing.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

Finding Nemo is, as it happens, the most dangerously sugared of the Pixar productions to date--how could any father-finding-son saga be otherwise?--but the threat is now one of oversophistication. [9 June 2003, p. 108]

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

It's all beautiful, all right. But before long I began to feel beaten against the rocks of that beauty -- Finding Nemo smacks of looky-what-I-can-do virtuosity, and after the first 10 minutes or so, it's exhausting.

TV Guide Angel Cohn

The colorful and kid-friendly characters are a delight, though very young children might be alarmed by some of the larger creatures, who tend to come into view teeth first.

Film Threat Kevin Carr

After four Pixar features under their belts, it is painfully easy to see the clichés emerging.