Marlin, a clownfish, starts off promising his wife, Coral, the whole ocean:

Marlin: So, Coral, when you said you wanted an ocean view, you didn’t think you were going to get the whole ocean, did you? Huh?
Marlin: Oh, yeah. A fish can breathe out here. Did your man deliver, or did he deliver?
Coral: My man delivered.
Marlin: And it wasn’t so easy.
Coral: Because a lot of other clownfish had their eyes on this place.

Like many couples in love, they name their future children, without considering that life sometimes has other plans. Pixar treats these middle class dreams seriously, though, and that’s what makes the next scene all the more tragic. The very dream of giving his future children the gift of an inexhaustible horizon cuts short Coral’s life and that of most of his children when a barracuda eats them.

Marlin, knocked out by the barracuda, is powerless to save his family. He finds just one egg and promises the impossible: “I promise I will never let anything happen to you.”

The problem, though, is that children were meant to do things. They were meant to go to school and to become full members of the community. 

Promising that nothing will happen means that everything is a potential enemy – and that, at least, is exactly where Marlin finds himself. Compounding his neurosis is that his son, Nemo, was born with a “bad flipper” that makes swimming tough. The ocean, as our world, is constantly in flux – and dangerous. Andrew Stanton put it best in an interview with National Geographic: “I know it’s precarious out there.”

And precarious it is! Nemo, as Icarus didn’t heed Daedalus’s calls, journeys out to that very ocean toward a boat – and winds up in an aquarium in an Australian dentist’s office, miles from home and Marlin, of course, resolves to find him before he goes once and for all, off to the dentist’s niece, never to be heard from again.

For conservatives, again, we find that Pixar shares our values, even if it isn’t as full-throated as we would like. Indeed, its quiet articulation is the best kind of sedition.

There’s the love of a father. In an era in which paternal rights are akin to hate speech and when “choice mom” has entered the lexicon, the idea that a single father would travel 20,000 leagues to rescue his son might seem alien. Mothers, we know from nature, will die for their cubs. (Witness the rise of Palin’s Momma grizzlies.) But fathers trying to help their children? How retrograde in our era of no-fault divorces, how insulting. How. Dare. Pixar!

There’s the love of sacrifice, best exemplified by the kind of Great Escape ethos permeating the aquarium. Gill, voiced by the magnificent Willem DaFoe, gives up his chance at rescue by helping Nemo reunite with his father. 

Finally, there’s the perseverance. Nemo works to save himself by clogging up the filter with a pebble. He’s nobody’s cripple. His weak fin, though an obstacle, doesn’t stop him from living the good life. The fish of the aquarium tank expect the best of him. There’s no ADA condescension in the fish tank. Meanwhile, Marlin, battles jellyfish, sharks, and whales to see his son again. The love a father knows for his son keeps him going, even when all seems lost.

Abraham Lincoln once said:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

Finding Nemo said it simpler. “Just keep swimming.”

In an age where Dreamworks’ feeds us a steady diet of kung-fu pandas and boogie-in-your-butt lemurs voiced by the guy that gave us Borat, three-to-thirteen year olds have a place to fill up on some traditional values – Disney/Pixar.  

My wife and I took our 6-year old boy to see Up on Saturday to a packed movie theater in Washington, DC’s Georgetown neighborhood.  All we heard in the theater was laughing, deep emotion and applause. And why not?  Up is film that, had it been produced with live actors decades ago, may have starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.  It is classic American storytelling – true love, big dreams, self-reliance and fierce determination. It doesn’t need gimmicks, politically correct characters or audience focus-group testing to determine its destination.  It relies on Russell, who misses his Dad, and Carl Fredricksen, a lost old curmudgeon grieving over the death of his wife – they get us where we’re going.  You know them – they’re the sort of folks we see and meet most everyday.  

It’s crystal clear — the golden age of animation has returned to the American cinema since Pixar made Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Wall-E and Up.  Pixar virtually invented CGI animation, but masters such as John Lasseter, Brad Bird and others have remembered that dazzling audiences with the computer doesn’t really matter if you can’t remember to have healthy dose of humanity.  Case-in-point: the exchange between 8-year-old Russell to old man Fredricksen – when walking though the jungles of South America, Russell recounts a simple day with his estranged Dad as they counted cars on the curb of a local ice cream shop. “That might sound boring,” Russell says with a flushed face, “but it’s what I remember most.”  

“Wonder and interest doesn’t have to come out of pizazz and spectacle and huge ideas. … I always knew that the power came from the small, and not from the big,” Wall-E director Andrew Stanton told Newsweek earlier this year. Oh, there may not be any sure-fire Happy Meal spin-offs, or top-40 hip-hop smash hits in Up, but that’s never what has made lasting, and ultimately successful, cinema. 

With all this good feeling, there has to be a catch, right?  Sure!  More and more, Pixar is coming under scrutiny from feminist critics who would rather see female lead characters featured in their films. Seemingly, themes on the the do-not-call-attention-to-list are a father’s undying quest for the well being of a son (Nemo), the willpower and love of an elderly man (Up) or the robot love of Wall-E (apparently, even though the female robot was clearly superior – the film was named after the male robot, and thus, inviting to criticism).  

But, hey – it’s summer.  Can’t we all just get along? If you want to remember how glorious it is to find true love, to dream the dreams of a child and then find out how life ends up after all that falls apart, Up is your movie…