why do you hate finding nemo????

chipmunkfanatic:

Anon! You need to stop asking me questions that make me sound all hateful! xD Finding Nemo and Tangled are probably the only two movies I’ve ever actively hated though. I like, or can at least appreciate, most movies for what they are but these two have a unique combination of being pretty universally popular and having several things about them I can’t stand. This means that I already didn’t like them, but then kept getting attacked with things that reminded me that the movies I consider to be horrible were getting all this, imo, undeserved attention. I know I can’t really blame others for liking it, but it made me resent them further. ^^;

Basically Nemo was something interesting. When it first came out, my older sister took me to go see it and I was ecstatic! I was around 7, I believe and had never seen a movie I didn’t like before. That all changed after seeing this movie…

Now, I actually don’t mind most of the elements in this movie. But the one that I hate completely overshadows everything I was neutral on and that one thing is the character of Nemo.

He’s a brat plain and simple. I hate it when movies let kids be horrid little brats then try to excuse their behavior with, “Oh, but he’s troubled!” And the thing is, I wouldn’t have minded that, had Nemo, I dunno, actually learned something. He didn’t grow. At all. Or okay, rather he didn’t grow in any way that was actually relevant to the main plotline. He became more confident. Cool, but was that what he needed to learn? No, he needed to learn to see from his father’s perspective. Which he never did. It was never even addressed. The closest thing we got was, “Oh he fought a shark, I guess he’s cooler than I thought he was.” But that is not the same thing. The main conflict in the movie is between Nemo and his father’s clashing ideas of love and family. Marlin lost his wife and all his other kids. He’s terrified of losing Nemo and overcompensates- believable, solid motivation and manifestation of that motivation. Nemo has been raised in an overly protective household. He doesn’t have a mom, though it’s never stated whether he knows what happened or in what ways it has affected his dad, but he does know that he doesn’t like being so coddled- also solid, believable motivation and manifestation.

Marlin grows well in the movie. He realizes that Nemo needs space to grow, comes to understand his son’s perspective, and tweaks his own behavior accordingly.

But Nemo does not come to the same conclusion. Nemo doesn’t understand his father any better than the beginning of the movie, he’s simply reacting to the fact that A) He’s just been through a near death experience and B) His dad visibly lightened up and did some cool stuff. He doesn’t come to the understanding that his father’s intense need to protect him stems from a fear of loss or that just because Marlin is his dad doesn’t mean he isn’t flawed or damaged or allowed to make mistakes.

Marlin gives, Nemo takes. There’s no compromise there at all and I believe that to be wrong. Sure, it can be said that Nemo is young and can’t be expected to understand things like that, but that doesn’t excuse him either. The camaraderie between the two at the end of the movie is shallow and not formed of a newly found understanding of each other as the entire movie was trying to leading up to, but a false kinship. Should Marlin ever begin to be protective again, Nemo would still react the same way, because although he sees his dad in a new, “Cool” light, he doesn’t understand why Marlin did all those cool things in the first place. It’s shallow because if the “coolness” ever fades, they’re back at square one and that is not growth. The main conflict is never fully resolved and it bugs the crap out of me that they let that slide.