This one's got teeth

Blockbusters such as The Matrix Reloaded grabbed the headlines. So how did a cartoon about an orange fish become the year's biggest earner at the US box office? By Geoffrey Macnab

There's a telling moment early on in the new Pixar computer-animated feature Finding Nemo. The film's hero, the fussy, neurotic clown fish Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks), comes face to face with three hungry sharks led by Bruce (Barry Humphries), a great white with a wonderfully toothy grin who simply can't get over his addiction to eating ocean titbits. Bruce, sent into a frenzy by a whiff of blood, tries to guzzle Marlin. The tiny clown fish, however, proves too nimble.

The clash between the minnow and the monster echoes a battle that has been raging at the US box office for the past few months. While carnivorous leviathans such as The Matrix Reloaded, Terminator 3, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, X-Men 2 and Hulk have attempted to devour the competition, Finding Nemo has outstripped them all to become the biggest money-maker of the year. It has already earned $275m in North America alone. There's even speculation that it may overtake The Lion King ($328.5m) to become the top-performing cartoon of all time in the US.

Why has an animated feature about a fish looking for his lost son Nemo (who has been kidnapped by a Sydney dentist and is being held in captivity in his aquarium) made the biggest splash since Spielberg's Jaws ushered in the age of the summer blockbuster in the Seventies? Pixar's customarily deft combination of wit and formal ingenuity surely lies at the root of its success. With its surfer-dude turtles, garrulous pelicans, sardonic crabs and amnesiac tang fish, Finding Nemo skirts clear of the sentimentality that might have been expected to sink such an endeavour. With its iridescent seascapes and astonishing footage of, for example, a massed army of long-tentacled jellyfish, it offers the same sense of spectacle and aesthetic pleasure that viewers expect from a natural-history documentary such as The Blue Planet. Intriguingly (given their target audience), Pixar's animators take a dim and thoroughly grim view of children. The villainess here is the dentist's brattish, brace-wearing niece Darla, a violent prepubescent in a "rock'n'roll girl" T-shirt, who has a past history of abusing fish. Whenever she appears, the soundtrack fills with screeching, Psycho-style music.

While The Matrix and co have flattered to deceive, attracting huge opening-weekend audiences and then seeing box office ebb away, Finding Nemo has been firmly ensconced in American cinemas for more than six weeks. Screen International's box-office analyst Robert Mitchell points out: "Kids' films always last longer because the kids will go back again and again." Finding Nemo won rave reviews across the board, whereas the reception for Hulk and The Matrix was much more mixed. "These films had very high expectations, which for a lot of people were not met... with those kinds of review, those people who weren't motivated enough to see the films on their opening weekend weren't inclined to go in the second week."

There are other factors to be considered. Sealife may have become "sexy", but timing is everything. A new spectacular, Sharkslayer, from Pixar's arch-rival, DreamWorks, is being billed as "an underwater Goodfellas" and is being voiced by Robert De Niro, Will Smith, Renée Zellweger and Martin Scorsese (who is playing a shark.) The point is that Pixar got its oceanic epic into the water first. Sharkslayer won't be ready till next year.

Most important of all, though, may be the fact that Finding Nemo is the first Pixar feature to be released in summer. In fact, it was granted the slot only because its production partner and distributor, Disney, didn't have a cartoon epic of its own to release.

The paradox about the success of Finding Nemo is that it is not necessarily something that Disney ought to be celebrating. Pixar is currently in the midst of protracted negotiations with the studio over how their co-production agreement should be extended. Recent reports suggest that Pixar wants Disney simply to release and market its movies, while the studio is still holding out for a say in how the films are produced.

Whatever the upshot of the negotiations, it is now widely recognised that Disney's own animated features are being eclipsed by those of its infinitely more playful and inventive young partner. At this week's preview screening of Finding Nemo, there was a trailer for Disney's new 2-D feature, Brother Bear (about a young American hunter who has turned into a bear). With its cutesy anthropomorphism and Phil Collins songs, Brother Bear seemed leaden, mawkish and old-fashioned by comparison with Finding Nemo. (One of the many pleasures of the Pixar film is that it doesn't come saturated with MOR songs designed to boost the soundtrack sales.)

As the Oscar-winning British animator Bob Godfrey (Kama Sutra Rides Again, Roobarb and Custard) observes, Disney is in danger of losing its way. "It is in trouble financially because it makes very expensive films that don't take off... it's a great big organisation that doesn't quite know what to do because daddy's long since dead. It's out of date and it's out of touch, but you can't tell a great organisation that. So it has been plodding on making Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules." He points out that the best animation is "anarchistic and surrealistic", but that those are not qualities that big corporations are ever likely to encourage.

Hinting at its own lack of confidence, Disney is looking more and more to outside companies such as Pixar and John Williams's Vanguard Films (the team behind Shrek, with which Disney recently signed a four-film deal) to provide the creative spark. Disney and Vanguard are collaborating on the new epic British cartoon Valiant, which is shooting at Ealing studios. What has never been in doubt is Disney's marketing and distribution firepower, but it would be ironic if a company whose name is synonymous with animation were reduced simply to releasing films rather than than making them itself.

It now seems a very long time since The Little Mermaid (1989) revived the great tradition of the Disney animated feature after the barren years of the Eighties, characterised by such patchy offerings as Oliver & Company (1988). The comeback lasted throughout most of the Nineties, with Beauty and the Beast securing a best-picture Oscar nomination and The Lion King and Aladdin breaking box-office records. Still, Mitchell cautions, it's too early to suggest that Disney is back in the doldrums quite yet. Even in the age of Pixar and digital wizardry, old-fashioned 2-D animated features can still work at the box office - as long as they have zest and a sense of humour. "The most successful are the ones that are fun and that are aimed directly at kids," he suggests: "the films like Lilo & Stitch and Emperor's New Groove, rather than the slightly more serious Cimarron: Spirit of the Stallion."

With the Toy Story films, Monsters Inc and now Finding Nemo, Pixar has consistently exceeded audience expectations. Thankfully, there is little indication that success is eroding the company's sense of mischief. Having beaten muscular blockbusters at this summer's box office, Pixar is now rubbing salt in their wounds by striving to parody them with its next animated feature, The Incredibles, about a family of dysfunctional, high-profile superheroes in preposterous spandex costumes. Some of them are so overweight, they can't even get their gear on. "Dinner's ready" calls Mr Incredible's wife. "Not now," he yells back furiously, only to reconsider. "Well, maybe just a salad..." He finally fastens his belt; seconds later, it explodes. As Pixar seems determined to demonstrate, small really is beautiful.

'Finding Nemo' is released in October