Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Ask any millennial for P. Sherman’s address and they’ll dutifully recite “42 Wallaby Way, Sydney,” even now, thirteen years after Finding Nemo‘s theatrical release. The film about a lost clown fish finding his way home resonated so deeply with its audience that Pixar, the company behind such magical films as Inside Out and Monsters, Inc., made a sequel, Finding Dory, which has been the early box office success story of the summer.
From the surfer-boy modeled turtles to the sharks trying to abstain from a life of eating fish (“Fish are friends, not food.”), Nemo’s journey to find his dad is filled with characters of all shapes and sizes. From Dory, the forgetful fish who is the titular character in the sequel, to the strangely relatable seagulls who yell “Mine! Mine! Mine!” relentlessly, Nemo is a poignant animated expression of diversity and understanding.
While kids movies can be seen as immature or surface level, Nemo was anything but. It dealt with finding your own way in the world, learning how to work with all different kinds of people (read: fish), and showed how families react to and deal with tragedy. That’s all true, great, and makes for a meaningful film, but, you know what? Finding Nemo is simply an adorable, uplifting (after the first scene…) movie that anyone can enjoy and relate to.
Nemo, just like any respectable Pixar film, made audiences laugh, cry, and root for the delightful fish. The sequel promises much of the same and, while it’s perfectly fine for children to be excited to see the movie, millennials are really the target market here. The bubbly and excited eight or nine year-olds who contributed to Nemo‘s $936 million box office profits back in 2003, are now in their early twenties and in great need of a Pixar pick me up.
For millennials specifically — with the stresses of work, student loans, and financial realities — sometimes a kids movie can serve as the perfect antidote to life. After all, Finding Nemo, both at its release and upon re-watch (of which there have been many), added so much to boring, everyday life. It made us laugh, “I shall call him Squishy and he shall be mine and he shall be my Squishy;” it showed us how to stay humble, “Mr. Turtle is my father. The name’s Crush;” it taught us how to deal with bullies, “You got a problem, buddy? Huh? Huh? Do ya, do ya, do ya;” it’s supremely relatable, “I forget things almost instantly.”
Above all though, Finding Nemo gave us perhaps the most quotable, encouraging, and most commonly used life advice ever when Dory said, “When life gets you down, you know what you gotta do? Just keep swimming.”
It’s something that many a millennial repeats in their head on a regular basis. Bad boss? Just keep swimming. Trains running late? Just keep swimming. Out of money? Just keep swimming. It’s like a mantra that everyone has accepted and deemed perfect because, well, it is.
Here’s hoping that while millennials are fighting their way into the theater to see Finding Dory this weekend, past high energy and likely screaming elementary aged children, they can calmly repeat that three word mantra, take their seat, and be instantly transported back to 2003 when they themselves were those annoying children.
