"Finding Nemo" Retrospective: 20 Years Later, Pixar's Crown Jewel Still Shines

The Studio's masterpiece is a touching portrait of a parent's love.

May 13, 2023

In September 1997, 2 ½ -year-old Guo Xinzhen got kidnapped while playing outside his home in Shandong, one of China's wealthiest provinces. He was a victim of the country's severe child abduction and trafficking issue, a decades-long epidemic: estimates place the number of children who disappear annually up to 200,000. In China’s second-most populated province, locating Xinzhen meant finding a needle in a 100-million-bale haystack.

His father didn’t care.

For the next 24 years, Guo Gangtang rode 300,000 miles throughout 20 provinces on a motorbike chasing leads. He flew two massive banners with his son’s face on them, inked with the messages, “Son, where are you?” and “Dad is looking for you to come home.”

He went through ten bikes, run-ins with muggers, life-threatening injuries, sleeping under bridges, and even contemplating suicide. But he never surrendered hope that he could make his family whole again. He could not and did not give up. His son was gone; his family shattered: searching for Guo Xinzhen was the only chance he had to be a father.

The story of Guo Gangtang touched hearts across the world. In 2021, authorities matched DNA to a 26-year-old man teaching in a nearby province and reunited father and son.

We marveled at the story of a father’s devotion and the rewards his love bore, a tale that seems like it could only exist in a movie and did nearly 20 years before when an agoraphobic clownfish traveled the sea to find his kidnapped son.

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In its prime, Pixar was the master of projecting real-world principles onto realistic fantasy, tinkering with intimate concepts to create stories as fantastic as familiar. What if toys could talk? What if the monsters in our dreams had a world of their own? What if every time we catch a fish, we destroy a family?

We marvel at the ceaseless color, whether in a mad dash through jellyfish, Nemo's fish tank initiation, or the reef-side neighborhood. We appreciate the small details: fencing swordfish, a generically-named trio of fathers seeing their children off to school, the great enigma of a man asking for directions, a sleeping fish letting her dream man know she’s a “natural blue,” and the slide-in of real estate marketing so a husband can congratulate himself as he marvels at the “ocean view.”

But none of those choices compares to the foundational messages at the heart of Finding Nemo, whether about love, family, loss, friendship, trust, bravery, growth, or the value in understanding that we affect our children as much as they affect us.

We love our children. We love them for being miniature versions of ourselves, vessels through which to correct the mistakes our parents made with us. We love them for letting us bless them with everything our parents got right and for seeing us for who we wish we were and want to be instead of, for better or worse, who we are. We cherish them for restoring that sense of family many of us lost when we struck out on our own, without realizing what we sacrificed by charting our course and never looking back.

We love our friends for swimming through any obstacle, diving to the depths of every hardship, and giving us the strength to do the impossible. We trust loved ones in every way that creates fond memories but rarely appreciate what that word means when the going gets tough.

We imagine we will rise when called upon, tackling challenges head-on with heroic abandon, but the reality often undermines our self-perception. We claim to welcome life’s challenges as opportunities to grow. When they overwhelm, forcing impossible circumstances that rob us of all we hold dear, we embrace the safety of the familiar and forgo the wonderment of the big, wide world.

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We feel for one another the way Finding Nemo has its characters feel for each other, and within that is the parallelism that made Pixar an animated juggernaut. Dory knows to “just keep swimming” and accept that we cannot foresee the outcome when we surge into the unknown. Nemo knows that life is for living and that the world isn’t as dangerous as his father believes, even if he understands it with the ignorance that colors every child’s worldview. Marlin knows that he never got to be a father, got robbed of being a husband, and that everything he gave to his family is at fault for taking them away.

Finding Nemo tells us that it’s okay to know all of these things so long as we allow ourselves to learn and remember that everyone is young to someone else. No one knows best because they’ve lived longer, suffered more, relished in greater joy, known fear or loss most cannot imagine, or have spent a lifetime cruising the current. We all have room to grow, whatever the catalyst.

In that way, it is as much a movie for children as adults. Kids are thoughtless and self-interested by nature; they don’t know better: we do. Yet, nothing can prepare us for the moments we thought would never come. No parent is ready for their child to say, “I hate you.” We know we can only do our best and often learn too late that the lesson gets learned from making inconceivable mistakes. We know our children don’t understand. We know they don’t grasp how deeply words can cut but how little they mean aside from our reaction. After all, no matter how much they “hate” us, we are the people they cry out for when a dentist scoops us out of the water.

Such ideas must get hammered home from the start while allowing every development to contribute, whether the payoff is short or long-term. Dory lets Marlin know it’s okay to surrender to hope, to let things happen to “little Harpo:” the glass can and always should be half full. We have no choice but to go forward, to “just keep swimming,” whether we must brave the darkness or power through the impossible. Love can be enough to make us do more than we ever imagined, but we shouldn't always need it to make us live life fully. We can use it as a kickstart or a hotshot, but it must give way to something more: not just love but understanding what love is and how deep it runs.

We feel it when Nigel comes to regale Nemo with the epic adventure his father has undertaken to find him. One day, everything we thought we knew will crumble. Whether during childhood, like for Nemo, or in middle age, like for Marlin, the once-uniting similarities give way to differences that separate us as we grow, and those we thought we understood seem worlds away. Our parents' generation had different values, and as we take the same steps they did, we thus leave a contrasting impression. Life must get lived, but we live it in different ways, and once we have bills to pay and children to raise, once we watch our children do what we did differently, the distance feels cavernous.

But that moment will still come: when we toss aside the petty disagreements and philosophical differences that define our relationship to realize that no matter what we say, what we do, or who we become, our parents love us. It stops being a thing we know without feeling it or something we acknowledge without genuinely considering it. It is something that almost seems impossible, so much so we can hardly believe it in the precise moment that it takes our breath away.

Nemo never imagined that Marlin would battle sharks, swim through a swarm of jellyfish, or dive to the ocean floor to battle a sea monster at all, let alone for him. Eventually, the words blend and fade; all that matters is that they happened, and if the little clownfish from the reef did the impossible, so can his son. Marlin is his dad, and he took on a shark.

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He’s a parent, it’s what he does, and every parent understands how matter-of-fact those risks are, but a child cannot. Every hurdle was a step closer to reuniting with his son, and in the great game of telephone, the feats reach Nemo’s ear differently than Marlin experienced them, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the truth inside the spectacle: Nemo is loved by the person whose love will always matter most.

Even if it does not cross Marlin's mind as he searches for his son, he too is loved by the person whose love will always matter most. We must find that in each other, parent to child and child to parent. By embracing that, Finding Nemo may have a self-explanatory title, but it is not a self-explanatory movie.

Guo Gangtang found his son, just like Marlin found Nemo, but Finding Nemo understands that parenthood is more than the dramatics that prove a parent’s love or confirm a child’s need. Being a parent must change the parent as much as it shapes the child. Marlin cannot allow this journey to be about the result. He’s grown from the fish who hides from danger to one who surges headfirst into peril. He’s gone from being the father terrified of fatherhood to embracing its true meaning.

He needs his son, but he also needs to be the father his son requires when all is set right. He has to land the joke, race his son to the "bus" stop, and watch him leave for school with joy and optimism.

We cannot ask children to come to us or meet us halfway. One day they’ll stop wanting to run into our arms, and we must know letting go isn’t surrendering our love or even them altogether. It's having earned those hugs and the affection behind them. It's giving them what we promised the day we brought them into the world: life. Only one task remains, and Pixar makes Marlin up to it: to live each day as he did in the ones he spent finding Nemo.