Monday, March 17, 2008

Journal #3 Finding Nemo


For the third journal I chose the film Finding Nemo, written/directed by Andrew Stanton, and Lee Unkrich. Andrew Stanton, Bob Peterson, and David Reynolds wrote screenplay. Starring the voices of such actors as Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Alexander Gould, and Willem Dafoe. Even for a cartoon this film was quite enjoyable for me, I really like all the humor within almost every scene even with lots of trouble surrounding the plot. It starts out with the fish marlin and his wife talking about their kids, his wife is killed along with 399 of his babies that lead him to greatly appreciate his son Nemo and be very overprotective. While chasing after the boat that captured his son he meets another character named Dorey that is the voice of Ellen DeGeneres. He becomes friends with her with in pursuit of his son Nemo. The story continues on in which Nemo is involved with the fish in the aquarium in plans to escape to save him from the wrath of the dentist’s niece, which inevitably would be his death. Marlin searches the ocean wide trying to attempt to find the place of “P. Sherman 42 Wallaby way, Sydney, Australia”. The Dentists tank becomes exceedingly dirty thanks to the plan of Gill and they are well on their way to escaping. Marlin is then almost digested by two different animals first of these is a whale, secondly a pelican, but as he is almost eaten he is saved by another pelican which is a friend of Nemo’s.
The actors chosen and the reasons why are the topic for this journal that I chose to research upon further. The first character is marlin and his rugged questionable voice brings out the character within him and how overprotective he is from the loss of so much in his life. Actor Albert Brooks plays marlins voice and he has sense of anxiety about his voice, which can really relate to Marlins pent up attitude towards life in comparison to his friend in the film Dorey. Marlin grows to understand that you have to trust sometimes in one another that things can be accomplished, somewhat learns this from trusting his friend such as when they are near death inside of the whale. Another character is Dorey who is the voice of Ellen DeGeneres in which she plays this very well with her excitement and tone of voice always flowing throughout her character in the story. She takes on the role of annoying sidekick in which DeGeneres seems to fill that spot like a glove, with her nasally voice fitting perfectly to Doreys character in which she has short term memory loss throughout the film. The third character to examine more in depth is Nemo, whose voice is played out by child actor Alexander Gould, which is hard to describe since this was his first major role. He has a sense of curiousity about his voice that suits Nemo in the film flawlessly with his ability to test the limits of his father. He has a sense for adventure and his higher pitched voice filled with excitement matches up to the playfulness of a young nemo quite well.