Time Magazine Reports On 'Finding Nemo'

They're only toys: cuddly cloth cowboys, adorable insects, furry monsters. But when the pixilated storytellers at Pixar fashion them, these playthings come to life. Take Marlin, the single-dad clown fish, voiced by Albert Brooks, in the new Pixar astonishment Finding Nemo. Brooks says that when a reporter on a junket described this fish father as overprotective, "I stood up and said, 'Overprotective? If your wife and almost all your children were eaten by a shark, you wouldn't be overprotective?' Then I realized — I'm yelling about a fish."

Of course, Marlin is not even a fish. He's a computer-generated image attached to a famously fretful voice. But Marlin has all-too-human qualities: insecurity, suspiciousness, giant wrinkles of worry and a lot of saving heart. Endearing flaws like these, along with an unmatched graphic elegance and elfin wit, have made Pixar's first four features — Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. — the gold standard in computer-generated imagination. Gold, as in $1.73 billion worldwide gross for that quartet, plus truckfuls more in video and DVD profits. Pixar owner Steve Jobs will need a battleship to hold all the money his current distribution partner, Disney, will need to fork over to renew their contract, which expires in 2005. The two studios now split the profits from Pixar movies, but since Pixar's CGI movies have been grossing nearly twice what the Mouse House's own animated films take in, Jobs wants a more grownup portion of the money.