Title: Preaching Nemo
Authors: ANDREW BOLT
Source: Herald Sun (Melbourne); 04/09/2003
Accession Number: 200309041023351325
Persistent link to this record: http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=200309041023351325&db=anh
Database: Australia/New Zealand Reference Centre
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Preaching Nemo

Edition: 1 - FIRST
Section: Opinion, pg. 023

Having broken all sorts of US records, Finding Nemo is making waves
here. But is this charming cartoon as innocent as it seems?

THERE'S something a little fishy about Finding Nemo, and I don't mean
the clownfish hero with the gammy fin.

I'm talking instead about the too-easy, no-pain, nature-worshipping
New Age-ism being pushed by this hit animation.

Don't get me wrong. Great story. Marvellous characters. I'd watch
the whole thing again just to hear Barry Humphries' voice as Bruce
the shark. And having packs of Australian seagulls squawking ``Mate,
maaate'' was gold.

My children loved it all, and it's no wonder Finding Nemo is the highest-grossing
animation the United States has seen, and last weekend
had the biggest opening box-office of any animation here, too.

This American-made movie clearly is speaking to and for millions of
children and their popcorn-carrying parents. But is what it's saying
more popular than wise?

Sure, Finding Nemo is only a cartoon, and analysing it as if it were
Ingmar Bergman would be like killing mozzies with a shotgun.

Yet the movie's makers over at Pixar Animation -- the hot new studio
that also gave us Toy Story -- have made clear that they are in
the messages business.

``We don't like to hit people over the head with messages, but they're
there,'' Pixar's creative director, John Lasseter, said last
month. ``They're at the heart of the movie.''

Finding Nemo is a morality tale which opens with a barracuda attacking
a little clownfish family on the Great Barrier Reef, leaving
only two survivors -- Nemo and his father, Marlin.

No wonder Marlin is an anxious dad after that, but will Nemo listen
to his warnings about swimming too far from the reef? You guessed
it: Before you can say ``aquarium'', Nemo has been fished from
the sea and plopped into a fish tank in a Sydney dentist's surgery.

And so begins Marlin's quest to find his son -- and Nemo's to escape.

It's not long before the movie turns preachy. Almost every fish is
good, naturally, but every human is stupid, careless or bad. Americans
in particular.

``Those humans, they think they own everything,'' complains a shark
after hearing scuba divers have taken Nemo.

``Yeah, probably Americans,'' adds another.

Lesson two is that fish, being nobler than humans, of course shouldn't
be kept in a fish tank.

``Fish aren't meant to be kept in a box, kid,'' a fellow inmate growls
to Nemo.

``It does things to you.''

THIS message has sure got through to some infant animal liberationists.
Plumbers in America tell of fielding calls from frantic parents
whose children -- on being told by the film that ``all drains
lead to the ocean'' -- have flushed their goldfish down the S-bend.

The same kind of thing happened after Free Willy taught millions of
children it was sinful to keep a killer whale in captivity -- a
lesson that thousands of children took so seriously, to the surprise
of the glib filmmakers, that they agitated to have the film's
star, an orca called Keiko, put back in the ocean after more than
20 years of applause and fish-fed ease in a Sea World.

Poor Keiko. He hates the cold and lonely ocean, and millions of dollars
and years of coaxing later still prefers to hang around humans
rather than swim off into the deep, dark wilds.

Lesson three is that eating an animal -- even a fish -- is sinful.
Killing anything is bad, which is why, for instance, former United
States president Bill Clinton is to record a new version of Peter
and the Wolf in which the savage duck-gobbling wolf isn't killed,
but brought to a zoo.

In Finding Nemo it's the sharks who go green and non-violent, and
declare they'll stop eating fish.

It's a great scene that's played for laughs, but the sharks chant
a slogan that the animal rights group PETA says it first coined:
``Fish are friends, not food.''

PETA, at least, thinks Finding Nemo is serious in advocating vegetarianism
and is printing the slogan on to bumper stickers. It also
sent a representative to the film's premiere.

Even the famed American movie critic Roger Ebert admired how ``some
of the characters have evolved admirably into vegetarians''.

What Finding Nemo doesn't explain, however, is what the sharks will
eat now that they've given up meat. But we're no longer good at
facing hard choices, are we?

The film's final message is straight from the 1970s child-raising
rules of Dr If-it-feels-good Spock: don't set children many boundaries.

Marlin is rebuked for being too strict with Nemo by -- what did you
expect? -- a recklessly indulgent surfer-dude turtle, and later
by a brainless and childless Blue Tange called Dory, voiced by lesbian
poster girl Ellen DeGeneres. If Marlin tries to stop things
happening to his son, Dory babbles, ``then nothing will ever happen
to him''.

This homily convinces Marlin to loosen up, which is odd, since it's
actually Nemo's disobedience -- not Marlin's rules -- that gets
them both into more strife than a prawn at a barbecue. In fact,
Marlin is right -- his ocean is a dangerous place, and fish that
aren't careful get eaten, as were Nemo's 499 brothers and sisters.

And how many parents need to be convinced of the very opposite of
what Finding Nemo preaches? How many lazy or complacent parents need
to accept that the world can be a dangerous place, too, and that
they owe it to their children to better protect them from its
harms and temptations?

For many viewers, these messages in Finding Nemo -- that humans are
vile but nature noble, that killing is always wrong, that eating
meat is mean, and that parents should ease up with the rules --
will seem very true, or at least harmless.

Harmless? How harmless is it for children to be taught a morality
that is so impractical or shallow that it soon becomes a game of
pretend?

Pretend, all right. Despite spruiking vegetarianism, Finding Nemo
has a commercial tie-in with McDonald's, which now includes a Nemo
toy fish with every Happy Meal of dead cow or gassed chicken.

DESPITE cheering Nemo's escape from a fish tank, hundreds of Victorian
children are buying their own clownfish, often with a cheap
aquarium set from some who-cares pet shop that the manager of Coburg
Aquarium, our biggest outlet, predicts will have many of these
fish dead in weeks.

As I said, great movie. Lots of laughs and brilliant animation. But
as a thumb on the pulse of our culture, it's a worry. It shows
we've taken on a morality that demands little from us, isn't serious
and can't survive in sunlight.

Finding Nemo? It's we who seem lost.

bolta@heraldsun.com.au

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Source: Herald Sun (Melbourne), SEP 04, 2003
Item: 200309041023351325