When I first saw the poster for The Matrix in 1999, I laughed, imagining its Agnès B.-gone-sci-fi campaign to be nothing more than a gussied-up look for Johnny Mnemonic Part II. “What is the Matrix?” it beckoned, and to be honest, I couldn’t have cared less. Imagine my surprise when the Wachowski brothers (whose only previous credit was the enjoyable lesbian-noir, Bound) turned out a fully realized sci-fi world—one full of its own rules and mythologies that seemed rich and intriguing, and offered as an added bonus a cohesive visual identity that fully complemented its narrative intricacies. That the world it inhabited was ours seen through the looking glass of semiotic theory (the ultimate insider discourse cleverly appropriated and made digestible for the masses), encouraging the questioning of our perceptions of reality, and by extension certain political structures built on them, made it seem all the more useful and oddly out-of-place in a multiplex. Three months later George Lucas proved that he had lost his shit with The Phantom Menace, and you could practically feel the fan-boys racing to scrape all mention of The Force from their blogs in favor of lengthy treatises on the fabric of the Matrix. I don’t think any of them could have imagined that four years later the much-heralded second installment of the trilogy would be literally swept away by the resonant force of Pixar’s new lost fish fable.

Yet it’s now June, with summer barely started, and I’m ready to proclaim Finding Nemo the best of the blockbusters, and perhaps one of the best films of the year. By now it’s become commonplace to praise Pixar’s films for their dexterous straddling of the age gap. All of the studio’s (and maybe more than any other entity currently working, Pixar’s coherent output and collaborative processes hearken back to the Golden Era of studio filmmaking) films tickle the minds of adult viewers while simultaneously dazzling their children with virtuoso displays of digital agility. Yet many adults hold a bit of praise in reserve; though smart, are the films anything more than advertisements for the cuddly toys, sequels, and special-edition DVDs they’ll have to shell out for later? Such an assumption reflects a certain justified cynicism on the part of a moviegoing populace inundated by a system of cultural production that the first Matrix film spends much of its time trying to decode. However, it’s impossible to watch Finding Nemo and The Matrix Reloaded and not wonder if their roles somehow got switched. Instead of politically subversive, The Matrix Reloaded is mostly soulless and lacking in dissent, more a product of the nefarious systems of control its characters battle against (to their credit, the Wachowski brothers did limit product tie-ins to action figures, sunglasses, and cars, putting their foot down at Matrixburgers), and almost wholly lacking in the coherence of philosophy that made its predecessor such a surprise. By contrast, Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo brims with vitality and vision, mixed in equal parts with a powerful longing and sadness. It may not have a politicized agenda, but by reminding us of so many qualities lost to mainstream cinema (and cinemagoers) ends up providing viewers an experience more revolutionary than Reloaded.

Much of the buzz surrounding Reloaded has foscused on its digital effects, especially the advancements made in the Wachowskis’ patented “bullet-time” technique. Used in the first Matrix as a device to further the inquiry raised by the film’s plot, it suggested a fluid, pliable world and emphasized possibilities afforded by a re-perception of its basic building blocks. Reloaded features more, and “better” bullet-time, but like the rest of the film, doesn’t offer any expansion on the ground rules of the Matrix laid out by its predecessor. After the provocative first film, Reloaded reeks of slump, and it isn’t until the film’s final moments, when Neo and Co. move the battle for humanity from the realm of the imaginary into the real (at least their real) that things start to wake up. Even the philosophical constructs seem more of an afterthought the second time around. Though there’s probably a great dissertation to be written about the shift in focus between films from 20th century theories of reality to older conceptions of the self and action, as presented in easily digestible tic-tac form, it doesn’t make for great cinema. Again, the only worthy addition comes near the end—the revelation that the construction of the Matrix predicts the Neo figure, and even may require his creation, neatly summarizes contemporary ideas of the intertwined relationship between hegemony and resistance. Hopefully Revolutions will offer a better way out than the traditional ideal of heterosexual love the Wachowskis have fallen on to easily resolve both films.

As much as the Matrix crew should be scolded for their lazy use of digital technologies and continental philosophy, the folks at Pixar should be applauded for continually trumping themselves and reminding us that there are some upsides to the advent of digital moviemaking. If American audiences had two Finding Nemos for every vapid digi-buster and moronic, poorly made DV-feature that found acclaim at Sundance, there might yet be some hope for the species. Through its tale of an aquatic father searching for his lost son, Nemo distills the essence of parental love into a fable so deeply felt that I was left stunned. It works not only because so much is at stake in father Marlin’s (voiced by Albert Brooks) quest, but because the potential dangers are made so hugely apparent, and in unexpected and truly scary ways. (Though the fate of the entire human race is at risk in Reloaded, it’s awfully easy to forget.) In a sequence that steps right over The Lion King on its way to Bambi-dom, Nemo’s mother and siblings are turned into dinner by a cruising barracuda—warm serenity converted in a split second to vast loneliness, and this all within the first five minutes of the film. The ensuing ninety-five are just as daring. By setting their tale in a perfectly crafted underwater world, the filmmakers have surmounted a true challenge for digital animation’s representational claims and tapped a perfect visual metaphor, ending up with a triumph of creative possibility. In the Wachowskis’ world, all of their very human characters carry out their inhuman feats in an imaginary plane. In Finding Nemo’s synthetic, impossible, underwater universe, Marlin, his friend Dorie (wonderfully played by Ellen Degeneres), and the rest must perform similarly, and without safety nets. It’s to Pixar’s credit that it’s a world impossible not to believe in.

The works of both sides (Wachowski vs. Pixar) employ digital technologies to prompt the viewer into reconsiderations of different structures in their real plane of existence. Given that the Hollywood system is held accountable for creating many of the parameters with which we view this world, the ability of these films to call attention to its workings is near-miraculous. If the Matrix films are remembered for anything, it must be for their visual realizations of the unconscious relations that bind us. It remains to be seen whether Revolutions will be able to cough up a satisfactory exit strategy for humanity, but with the series’ deepening emphasis on kung-fu, hi-tech weaponry, and cool sunglasses, over real, incisive dissent, I’m wondering how useful in the real world this victory might be. We all live in the Matrix, or a matrix of some sort, and our lack of an easily identifiable “them” for the collective “us” to align against blunts the use value of the Wachowski’s trilogy. However, quietly, in the background, Pixar’s been providing alternate answers all along. Their galaxies of fish, bugs, toys, and monsters are ours, laid plain, yet rendered strange by fanciful shifts in context. Pixar’s imaginative refashionings spark our imaginations to fantasy; an activity that may well be the last free space afforded a humanity battered by an increasingly mundane and overwhelming world. Pixar represents a cinematic escape, in the best sense of the word—one that leads us right back to ourselves. In the battle for minds (and screens) this summer, my bet’s with Nemo.
—JEFF REICHERT