Finding Nemo

12/06

Comedy, Animation/US/English (Japanese subtitles)/101 minutes
Cast: Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Alexander Gould
Director: Andrew Stanton
Pixar/Disney

Finding Nemo reduced this hard-bitten reviewer to tears. No, really.
And it's not a confession that comes easily. However, these tears were not the sad kind, they were the laughing kind.

Ignore the Disney label on this film — this is a Pixar movie through and through. Pixar are those eccentric computer nerds that brought usToy Story and Monster's Inc. and Finding Nemo cements their reputation for consistent quality and innovation. All the Pixar trademarks are here: the witty characteri-sation, fast, tight plotting, and spectacular animation. As usual the gags are not all for the kids —there's plenty for us big kids too, like the shark called Bruce who speaks with an Australian accent and who has started a self-help group along the lines of alcoholics anonymous for sharks that want to control their addiction to fish.

The story follows Marlin, an over protective, neurotic and desperately unfunny clown fish searching for his son Nemo after he has been decaptured by a scuba diver. Marlin has tragedy in his past and as a consequence has all the usual parental anxieties magnified to obsessional proportions, so when Nemo disappears, Dad will go anywhere and do anything to get him back. The lingering note of tragedy adds a hint of poignancy to the comedy of the whole film.

Perhaps this is an unpromising premise for a film but the Pixar team's talent for making the ordinary into something unusual gives the adventure an entirely fresh feel. Arguably the dialogue and the plotting are not quite as sharp as earlier films but to make an issue out of this would be churlish. The setting for the adventure, the Pacific ocean, Australia's barrier reef and the city of Sydney gives the animators plenty of scope to ratchet their skills another notch, creating scenes of quite stunning beauty.

But what makes the film bubble is the cast of digital characters, each of whom is a caricature of a familiar human type. Finding Nemo is not simply a fishy adventure, it is more a gentle, affectionate mocking of its human creators.

The Last Samurai

12/06

Historical/US/English and Japanese (English and Japanese subtitles)
Cast: Tom Cruise, Ken Watanabe, Hiroyuki Sanada
Director: Edward Zwick
Warner Brothers

Captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) is a soldier without honour. He is a man of decency and ideals but as member of the 7th Cavalry he became complicit in the murder of innocent women and children. He cannot live with the shame and we meet him as an alcoholic and a performing monkey for the Winchester weapons company.

Being recruited to go to Japan to train their modernising army to fight against an insurgency of traditionalists does nothing to relieve his fatalism and gloom. In his first encounter with the insurgents he is captured and taken to their mountain village where he quickly discovers that these people are not savages as he has been led to believe: they are educated, disciplined and devoted to the code of the samurai.

He becomes fascinated as he realises these are people who live by unshakable principle. He learns their ways and sets off on the road to recovering his own honour and integrity.

This powerful and moving film is about a clash of values: venality and principle; about a clash of civilisations: the Western technologised, commercial world and an older philosophy-driven way. The artful directing through shots of telegraph poles and railway lines scarring Tokyo reminds us that the forces changing Japan are the same ones that seized America's west.

The vision of Japan's reformers is enlightening as we see that the rush to modernise was part of a factional power struggle within Japan: the modernisers had no interest in modernity except for the power the technology and commercial systems would give them over their rivals; they were self-serving manipulators of a weak Emperor.

The Last Samurai parts with the Hollywood tradition of hiring cheap Chinese imitations of Japanese people and uses well-known actors of real presence and talent: Ken Watanabe as dissident samurai Katsumoto deserves a truck-load of Oscars and there are impressively toned performances from Hiroyuki Sanada and Koyuki.

If Hollywood is to movie making what the telegraph rail companies were to the west, then The Last Samurai is the noble dissident. Let's hope it's not the last one.

Film Reviews: Chris Page

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