Harry goes gaga over THE ART OF FINDING NEMO book!

Pixar simply rules… Today, in a surprise package from some publishing company that sends me tons of film books each year, I got one that really surprised me.

THE ART OF FINDING NEMO

Inside… Wow… Ya know, looking at the trailers, I thought I had a handle on the scale of this movie, and frankly I was impressed by it. The undersea vistas, the coral the sea life on the bottom floor of the ocean… it was all leaving me with an impression that… well, that the film looked like another great outing from PIXAR.

Then I got this book, a book that made me look and stare at each page agog by the beauty I found. With a computer generated film, many people often marginalize it to being the work of just COMPUTER ARTISTS that are sitting around building structures, then handing that structure off to some muscle guy or gal, then that muscled structure goes to some texture mapper that puts the skin on, then some lighting folks that light that skin… What is often times forgotten… the thing that you never really think about till you see it in a book like this… is all the pre-production art, the conceptual work… the art meant to inspire tone, emotion and atmosphere. The charcoal illustrations that look like some modern Thomas Hart Benton woodblock…

As I was flipping through the book, I came to a whole series of illustrations about undersea landscapes… both realistic and impressionistic… color and black & white… As I was turning the marvelous pages I came to an illustration of a broke in half WWII submarine on the bottom of the ocean floor… decades of life built upon it, sediment, coral formations… all growing upon this recognizable man made construct and I got giddy. I didn’t want to READ the book, because I don’t want the characterizations of the story laid bare for me, but I love seeing the images… trying to imagine how it all comes together. I’ll read the book when I return from the theater and I want to spend a few hours in that universe, but for now… I love dancing with these impressions. I love seeing a barnacle attached Flying Tiger on the ocean floor… scarred Sharks, barracudas and stranger things yet.

The only page I read was a introduction page by the director, Andrew Stanton… I met him on my visit to Pixar back around the opening of A BUG’S LIFE… a nice guy. According to his little preamble to the pictures, the first notion of this story entered his head as a boy in a dentist’s office looking at the aquarium and imagining that each fish wanted to get back to the ocean, to the family from whence they came. On subsequent visits he often wondered what the fish think of humanity based upon their Dentist’s Aquarium existence. The lurid black light colored decorations in the tank… that miniature skeleton against the treasure box that opens up with bubbles from time to time… Those creatures on the other side of the glass. He began to think it would be like someone judging the United States having only seen Las Vegas. --- Around this time I began to like where I felt he was probably going with this story of his. --- Then he talked about how he never really had the story blossom for him till a couple years back, sometime in 1999 when he was taking his son out for a visit to a park, and his 5 year old was running ahead of him, and he was backseat driving him… Screaming to watch out for the curb, the street, don’t do that it’s dangerous… and realizing that by being overly-protective, he was being a bad parent. Then he decided to marry the theme of Fatherhood and the relationship between fathers and sons to a story of separation and literal… FISH OUT OF (big) WATER story he had as a child. Then with the work of many super-geniuses… which they breed in this wild laboratory that Steve Jobs has in this huge underground facility in the Bay Area… well, the story and film FINDING NEMO began to take shape, firm up and now we’ll get to see it this May.

What I liked about that, is what I like about the PIXAR films in general… the universal themes they bring to their stories… the simple truths that give their films a timeless parable feel that is missing from all other American Feature Animation today. I have all the “Art Of” books from the PIXAR universe, this one makes me all the more anxious to see the final film. If you see it at a book store, and you’re trying to pinch pennies, beware of flipping through it… You’ll find yourself charging it to a card of some sort… You won’t be able to help yourself, I know I wouldn’t if I didn’t have it already.