Starring: Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Alexander Gould

Pixar, let's face it, hasn't made a bad feature film yet. Out of sheer orneriness you could say Monsters, Inc. lacked focus. You could say that their "one big theme" motif ("It's a rock," from A Bug's Life) is overused and getting a bit stale. You could say that Toy Story 2 was a happy accident. They're ligament-ripping stretches, but you could do it.

Pixar forces ornery people to dig deep in their curmudgeonly bag once again with Finding Nemo, an inventive, colorful, entertaining family film that finds director Andrew Stanton and the Pixar folks in near top form. Nemo's nearly as good as their best film, A Bug's Life, and, in several areas, leaps and bounds above their other wonderful films. So it's already in rarefied air.

The company continues their tradition of telling compelling stories with witty scenarios that manage to entertain both adults and children without talking down to either. What elevates Nemo to a more resonant plateau is the same thing that elevated Bug's Life. Pixar seem to thrive as a conglomerate Aesop, taking simple animals tales and turning them into something rich, humorous, touching, and gleeful.

Like Aesop they leverage our basic knowledge of the animal kingdom and tweak it to make commentary, make a story point work, make us laugh and most of all to remind us of our own glaring, painful foibles. The timing for this film, and the point they're trying carefully to make, is impeccable. The world is a dangerous place. Fear washes over us. We have alarms on our cars, houses, and in some ways, our countries. We get so paranoid because the world IS a dangerous place. But how does one move about and live in such a crazed, barbaric world without being paralyzed with anxiety? How can one be a parent, responsible for innocents, or be a child coddled to the point of suffocation, in such a world?

It's not really a question you expect to confront in a G-rated film, particularly not from something flying under the despotic Disney banner. But confront it you do and right off the bat as the filmmakers set the correct expectations before the main title appears. Marlin (Albert Brooks) and Coral (Elizabeth Perkins), two clown fish, have just set up house in a lovely anemone and await the hatching of their 400 eggs. Marlin, who has been talking about the couple's future plans inside the anemone, suddenly notices a strange silence from without. He pokes his head through the stinging tentacles and sees Coral directly in the path of a barracuda. Coral tries to save her eggs and Marlin tries to save her; neither are successful.

It's not a gratuitous Bambi-esque homage either. Death, pain, and loss are constantly at the forefront in Finding Nemo. Every major character, at one time or another during this movie, is assumed to be dead. That may be too much for small children but it's not done capriciously. It's a reminder. The world is a dangerous place. You have to be careful.

Marlin takes his lesson with the barracuda too far and becomes an over-protective father to his only remaining spawn, Nemo. Nemo, who has a deformed fin, resents his father's cautiousness, particularly concerning him. A reckless act gets Nemo caught by a dentist who puts him in his office tank and Marlin has the impossible task of finding his son.

Marlin is aided by Dory, voiced by Ellen Degeneres. Dory's an irrepressible, blissfully ignorant optimist who counters Marlin's pessimism with a complete and utter lack of historical perspective or memory (she tells Marlin she has no short-term memory). The fusion of Degeneres's vocals and the animation of Dory is a remarkable treat; it's an outstanding vocal performance.

Also of special note is the rich, sumptuous look and palette of Nemo. Some scenes on the surface, near a jetty, are reminiscent of the lush stop-motion backdrops seen in films such as 1953's Hansel and Gretel. You don't want them to end. You wish the camera (because they make you believe there is a camera) would go in there. But this is a movie set in the water and what the animators have done here is so precise, so painstaking, that it could be entirely taken for granted. The way blood disperses in water, the way that particles float aimlessly about, it's all done with such attention that it barely registers. It's pure artistry.

The funniest bits, as always, are when the anthropomorphizing of the creatures echoes with our own experiences. Though we laugh at the scenes where a trio of sharks are trying to become fish teetotalers it's not until a bloody nose sends one of them into a frenzy that it speaks to what we know. The characterization of seagulls in the movie may be one of the funniest sequences in the last several years.

Huzzah for Pixar and the people there making their movies. They'll be a day when we'll be talking about them and the bygone days of their triumphs wistfully and appreciatively (look at Disney today…ugh) but let's hope that day is very far off in the future.