Fucking Nemo

On Saturday night, I got into a heated debate at the bar called Tom and Jerry on the lower east side. There I was, outside with a few peeps when the godawful Disney/Pixar sugarcoated waterventure, "Finding Nemo," came up.

My issues with this bullshit excuse of a film are many:

Just before Nemo is born, his mother and all his little brothers/sisters are eaten. Nemo is born into the ocean without mother or siblings and with a bum flipper to boot. Rebelling against his understandably overprotective father, Nemo is lost in the ocean and separated from his father only to end up in a dentist office fishtank with no hope of reunion. Although the film has a "happy ending" involving Nemo's widower father potentially shacking up with another fish, I hardly think it's children's fare.

"Oh, but it's a growth process!"

That's what people tell me. The thing is . . . both Nemo and his father are already in the throes of a growth process at the top of the movie. There's no need to separate them further and have them risk death to find each other again. The trauma they've both endured, coupled with the weak flipper, has already cemented them as survivors. Haven't they suffered enough?

"You're taking it too literally!"

I'm gonna play the dead mom card on this one. Forgive me. It is my feeling that Nemo has already been thrust into the world of adulthood at a very early age. His family, potentially 200 fish strong, was shot to two in a split second. He feels the reverberations of that tragedy every day when he wakes up and swims with his fucked up flipper. There is no need for him to then be separated from his father and endure the danger of the ocean with his limited means. His father, in turn, has lost his wife and all of his children, save the cripple. He's already got a full hand with which he must deal. "Finding Nemo" is Disney's interpretation of "Dancer in the Dark" but with the aforementioned "happy ending."

I think it was a tragedy that this horrific film won the Oscar for Best Animation over the superbly crafted, beautifully woven "Triplets of Belleville." I can't believe people show this tragedy to their children. In my opinion, it is horribly inappropriate.