Back in 1989, Walt Disney Pictures released what many at the time thought would prove to be the most famous and enduring ocean-based children's movie, The Little Mermaid. While Disney's traditionally animated classic is certainly still well regarded to this day, it may be safe to say that, going by box office and home media sales, Pixar managed to outperform them with 2003's Finding Nemo. Children's animated movies are hardly renowned from deviating too far from narrative conventions, and while Finding Nemo hardly breaks the mold - with its coming-of-tale age about a (clown) fish out of water (if you can forgive the pun) - it nevertheless delivers the goods with enough charm and wit to secure its place in the canon of Pixar's greater works, while throwing in a touch of parental anxiety to give the parents something to associate with. As you'd expect from Pixar it's often breathtaking to look at, while the animation and voice acting brings the variety of fish and crustaceans wonderfully to life. Predictably a sequel is in the works, and hopefully it'll be a considerable improvement over Pixar's more recent efforts, most notably Planes, which seemed to indicate that Disney's grasp over the animation studio is having a deleterious effect on the standard of their output. As for the real-world clownfish, unfortunately their popularity as pets, despite the difficulty of maintaining tropical fish in a tank, has sadly led to their environmental devastation.
