Finding Nemo
Directed by: Andrew Stanton
A PIXAR film.
The writing of this film is extraordinary, the plot, character arcs and themes all of them are orchestrated beautifully to form a cohesive screenplay. This movie is a journey of a fish, Marlin, who loses his kid, Nemo and Marlin has to go and find the kid. This is the goal of Marlin, but what comes in way of the journey? Marlin's flaw, that is his fear. Now, Marlin has to either stay the way he is or else he has to change himself and overcome the fear by taking the journey. But, nobody is comfortable to change that easily, especially when we are asked to do something that is out of our characteristics. Marlin is forced to take this journey, because it is his son and probably the only purpose in his life. How do we feel empathetic towards Marlin? How do they create that? By the opening prologue of the film, we see the reason behind Marlin's flaw. Marlin loses his wife and all of their eggs and the only remaining egg is Nemo, so we find his flaw reasonable and we are rooting for him to overcome his flaw throughout the journey.
Marlin meets Dory, whose flaw is her short term memory and that is not necessarily a flaw, that is used as another plot device. How do we know that Marlin is overcoming his fear? When he saves himself out a situation and he goes back and risks his life again to go save Dory, that is when we he is overcoming his fear. There are a number of incidents in the film where we see that Marlin has tough choices to make, he has to let go and every time this happens it challenges his characteristic and when he sees good things happening because of that, he changes slowly. Finally, when we see Marlin and Nemo together, they have small setup and payoff like Marlin's friends asking him to crack a joke and at the end he confidently tells them a joke without stuttering. Pixar's films are masterclasses for writers, especially on creating empathetic characters and creating coherent character arcs.
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