Sarah Gouriche
Finding Nemo, the third most profitable G-rated movie to date (Box Office Mojo, 2018), follows a father fish, Marlin, struggling to find his son, Nemo, after Nemo gets taken by humans and is alone for the first time in his life. As both fish struggle to reunite, they each encounter obstacles such as beguiling sharks and captivity in a fish tank. Given the popularity of the film, it is clear that it provides audiences with a high degree of satisfaction – a term which, with reference to films, means that viewers feel fulfilled after having watched the film. However, it is somewhat surprising that Finding Nemo engenders such a high degree of satisfaction in its viewers, given the challenging nature of the main theme of the film: loss. Loss is not only depicted through Nemo and Marlin’s struggle to cope with their separation from one another. In fact, loss enters the film from its first minute when Nemo’s mother, Coral, is murdered by a barracuda before Nemo has even hatched. Thus, even when Nemo and Marlin are reunited at the conclusion of the film, Coral’s death remains a loss that cannot be resolved, emphasizing to the audience the harsh reality that loss is an unavoidable component of life. In light of the seeming incongruity between this melancholy message and Finding Nemo’s ongoing popularity, this review sought to understand how the film’s depiction of loss is related to audience satisfaction.
While Finding Nemo represents loss as inevitable, there is a clear focus on overcoming the adversity of loss. After being separated from one another, Nemo and Marlin are willing to undergo great hardship in order to reunite – such as Nemo’s bravery in swimming into the dangerous water filter of a tank as part of a plan for escape. In fact, the more final loss of Coral is depicted as an ongoing challenge of adaptation, in that, prior to their separation, Nemo and Marlin struggle to navigate and define their relationship as each other’s only family; Nemo seeks greater freedom from his father, but we see Marlin struggling with the memory of losing Coral as he seeks to shelter Nemo from any possible danger. Thus, Finding Nemo shifts the audiences’ focus from the loss itself to the characters’ attempts to deal with it (Colman et al., 2014), therefore making Nemo and Marlins’ emotions of anxiety at how to cope with the loss the main focal point of the film (Langham, 2018).
By centering the film on the emotional challenges of two likeable characters, Finding Nemo is able to trigger a reaction of empathy in its audience; our emotions naturally shift to mirror those of the characters, such that we feel Nemo and Marlin’s anxiety along with them (Davis, 1980). Empathy is a filmmaker’s most important tool, with cinema being the medium which “allows people in a virtual dialogue with their own and their culture’s unconscious” (Izod & Dovalis, 2015, p. 1). In the context of movie-watching, the audience relates to a character by putting themselves in the character’s shoes – in light of the human tendency to be egocentric, we can only understand characters’ experiences by viewing them in the context of our own (Planck, 2018). Thus, even children, who might not yet have experienced extreme loss such as the death of a parent, will contextualize the characters’ struggles and emotions within their own knowledge and experiences of loss and anxiety (Izod & Dovalis, 2015), though their ability to fully understand Nemo and Marlin’s experiences will grow as their own store of experiences expands (Planck, 2018). As such, the lessons that films such as Finding Nemo teach deepen as maturity grows, and so the emotional impact of such films is different for children than it is for adults, explaining the popularity of animated films with people of all ages.
Notably, it is, in fact, the very experience of an intense emotional response that makes watching films feel satisfying, and so audiences intentionally seek out films that will evoke complex and vivid emotions (Oliver, 1997). Empathizing makes us, as humans, feel satisfied with our own ability to interpret emotions. It reassures us that we are able to understand emotional situations even outside our own agendas. Thus, although the inclusion of difficult themes such as death, separation and grief in children’s movies might initially appear to be detrimental to a child’s happiness, it actually may be beneficial to introduce such concepts using relatable, quirky characters and life-like situations as tools (Colman et al., 2014), to allow children to begin to understand death through a comparison to their own range of experiences. Therefore, while at first it might seem that such challenging issues as death and anxiety are out of place in a children’s film, and that they might detract from the audience’s enjoyment, it is precisely these dark themes that make the film satisfying to audiences. Finding Nemo continues to satisfy both adults and children because the portrayal of characters’ suffering and their anxiety as they try to work through it naturally evokes strong feelings of empathy; Nemo and Marlin’s struggles with loss create the vivid emotional response that makes the film fulfilling as we struggle along with them.
References
Colman, I., Kingsbury, M., Dykxhoorn, J., Hynes, K., Loro, A., Martin, M. S., . . . Anushka. (2014). Cartoons Kill: Casualties in animated recreational theater in an objective observational new study of kids’ introduction to loss of life. BMJ, 349, online.
Davis, M. H. (1980). A multidimensional approach to individual differences in empathy. JSAS Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 10, 85-104.
Langham, R. (2018). The psychological effects of children’s movies. Retrieved from http://www.winmentalhealth.com/childrens_movies_media_effects.php
Oliver, R. L. (1997). Customer delight: Foundations, findings, and managerial insight. Journal of Retailing, 73(3), 311-336.
Planck, M. (2013). I’m OK, you’re not OK: Right supramarginal gyrus plays an important role in empathy. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131009133057.htm
Top Grossing G Rated Movies at the Box Office. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/domestic/mpaa.htm?page=G&p=.htm