Finding Nemo Grief Essay

Nemo is Not the Only Thing Marlin Found

What sets Finding Nemo apart from all of the other Pixar movies is that within the first 5 minutes of the movie they have killed off almost an entire family. The degree of difficulty of this film is extreme and given to the rookie director, Andrew Stanton, at the same time makes it seem like they were trying to haze the him. To begin, it’s a movie about fish. Really if thought about, any animator can make toys, bugs and monsters dance and sing, but a fish is just a floating face. It’s as if they took Stanton’s characters, yanked off their arms and legs and handed them back. On top of all of this, most of the movie takes place in the ocean. A good third of the movie has no background at all and much of the rest takes place on a dull, featureless sea floor. Really this movie was just an impossible task. As said in The Filmist, creating Finding Nemo is “like a circus act that piles on more obstacles, just to be more insane”. (“On Pixar”). Even through all of these obstacles put in front of Stanton, he created a movie that pulls at the heartstrings and keeps us wanting more. How? Let’s look a little deeper.

At the surface, Finding Nemo is a story about a father traveling across an ocean facing obstacles like sharks and jellyfish, while also making some new friends out of a Regal Tang and a Turtle, to find his son, and bring him back home. But to keep us wanting more, as Jeff Smith discusses in his religious review of the movie, “the film focuses on real life issues: unexpected loss, parent child struggles, independence, a parent’s love to save a child from harm, trust, friendship, and the internal struggle of a parent who knows he/she cannot protect their child from every possible danger” (Smith). The movie’s underlying theme is the unexpected loss and how Marlin deals with it, but all of the other issues that arise sprout from that. Marlin, the father, lost his wife and all but one of his children to a barracuda attack in their neighborhood. Marlin does not want anything bad to ever happen to his son, Nemo. Later on Nemo’s first day of school, they take a trip to the drop off, where Marlin’s wife, Coral, and all of their children were taken from him. Then a diver took Nemo from Marlin. This made Marlin go on an adventure across an entire ocean to find Nemo, and along the way he found out things about himself that he had forgotten a long time ago.

Even though Finding Nemo is usually regarded as a nurturing tale of a father going through challenging obstacles to keep his son safe and by his side, it more importantly exposes how it is necessary to deal with the feelings and any grief that comes with losing someone very close. These feelings must be dealt with in a healthy way, usually known as the stages of grief. Grief is thought to be gone through in five stages. According to Lawther and Oehmen in their article about how counselors should help children dealing with grief, “the stages of grief are… denial… bargaining… anger… guilt… [and] resolution” (Lawther). Only when these stages are worked through can the loss be truly dealt with. Marlin tries to avoid dealing with his grief but is forced to when Nemo is taken from him. Marlin entered into the movie happy and about to have his children hatch, but after the attack, where he had no control, he focuses solely on having control of every aspect in his son’s life and not taking time to look at what he is doing to himself.

Without having dealt with his feelings, Marlin changes into a shadow of himself after his wife and children are killed. To start the movie, Marlin was showing off to Coral. He was confident, and willing to live in a slightly dangerous place to do so. After a barracuda attacks the drop off, though, Marlin loses his wife and all but one of his eggs. He had been so arrogant before about moving and being in a new neighborhood, that now he is broken because of his powerlessness against the barracuda. Nemo is the one egg that miraculously survived the attack. Marlin, having gone through this traumatic event, wants to control everything about Nemo’s life and actions because he did not have control before. Right here, Marlin should have been worrying about himself and dealing with the loss that he just experienced. By not beginning the grieving process right then, he is hurting his future self by just bottling all of his feelings up. Stephen Oehman and Jane Lawther introduce the idea that “grief is a term that many counselors associate with a death experience” (Lawther). Grief is something gone through by many people who have lost a loved one. These counselors do this because working through this grief is one of the very few healthy ways to cope with a death of someone very close. The only way to do so is to go through these stages. Yet Marlin does not want to accept the loss of his wife and about