Critics Scoreboard
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Average Critic Score:
89
(37 sources)
89
(37 sources)
-
100
Entertainment Weekly
You could trawl the seven seas and not net a funnier, more beautiful, and more original work of art and comedy than Finding Nemo. Read Full Review » -
100
Chicago Sun-Times
This time the dad is the hero of the story, although in most animation it is almost always the mother. Read Full Review » -
100
Chicago Tribune
Finding Nemo and its Pixar predecessors tap into the shared gene among the kids and adults that delights in imagination-engaging, eye-tickling and wit-filled storytelling. You connect to these sea creatures as you rarely do with humans in big-screen adventures. The result: a true sunken treasure. Read Full Review » -
100
New York Post
Summer hasn't even started, but you won't likely find a better catch this season than Finding Nemo, a dazzling, computer-animated fish tale with a funny, touching script and wonderful voice performances that make it an unqualified treat for all ages. Read Full Review » -
100
New York Magazine
It has what the most heartfelt Disney animated features used to have: rapturous imagery matched with real wit. Read Full Review » -
100
Premiere
I don't think we're going to see a better--a funnier or more genuinely heartwarming, for that matter--comedy this year. Read Full Review » -
100
Charlotte Observer
Pixar's employees, masters of computer-generated animation, capture the look of the ocean like no artists before. Read Full Review » -
100
-
100
San Francisco Chronicle
The visuals pop, the fish emote and the ocean comes alive. That's in the first two minutes. After that, they do some really cool stuff. Read Full Review » -
100
Miami Herald
It's the filmmakers' refusal to sugarcoat their tale's darker subtexts that makes Finding Nemo such a resounding piece of storytelling. Read Full Review » -
100
Washington Post
The great joy of watching a Pixar production is how it rewards not only younger viewers but their older companions as well. Read Full Review » -
100
LA Weekly
On a purely visual level, Finding Nemo is as gorgeous a film as Disney's ever put out, with astonishing qualities of light, movement, surface and color at the service of the best professional imaginations money can buy. Read Full Review » -
100
The Hollywood Reporter
An exhilarating fish story in the perfectly cast comic adventure. Read Full Review » -
90
Washington Post
May be a fish tale, but its story of the paradox of love -- knowing when to hold on means knowing when to let go -- is profoundly humane and human. Read Full Review » -
90
Slate
Of all the great vocal characterizations...the showstopper is Brooks, who hasn't had a part this good since "Lost in America" (1985). His Marlin is tender, cranky, hysterical, yet somehow lucid. Read Full Review » -
90
-
90
Time
Nemo, with its ravishing underwater fantasia, manages to trump the design glamour of earlier Pixar films. Read Full Review » -
90
The New York Times
The humor bubbling through Finding Nemo is so fresh, sure of itself and devoid of the cutesy, saccharine condescension that drips through so many family comedies that you have to wonder what it is about the Pixar technology that inspires the creators to be so endlessly inventive. Read Full Review » -
90
Wall Street Journal
An undersea treasure all the same, and a prodigy of visual energy. Read Full Review » -
89
Austin Chronicle
Pixar's Finding Nemo may well have the best casting of any animated film of the past 30-odd years. Read Full Review » -
88
New York Daily News
This stirring children's movie about separation anxiety is swimming with comic references only adults will catch, thus greatly expanding the potential audience. Read Full Review » -
88
Rolling Stone
Leave it to a g-rated cartoon to give the live-action epics a lesson in action, fun and bracing originality. Read Full Review » -
88
USA Today
The most gorgeous of all the Pixar films — which include "Toy Story" 1 and 2, "A Bug's Life" and "Monsters, Inc." —Nemo treats family audiences to a sweet, resonant story and breathtaking visuals. Read Full Review » -
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Though the Disney logo is on this movie, there is -- possibly excepting little Nemo himself -- not a single cloying, sentimental Disneyesque creature in it. There is, instead, wit and flair in concept and writing, the trademark of the Pixar people who drove the project. Read Full Review » -
88
Boston Globe
Pixar is so good at what it does that every other kiddie-entertainment purveyor -- including parent company Disney -- flounders in comparison. Read Full Review » -
88
ReelViews
As always, the voice casting is perfect. Throw in a moral, and some nice touches of technical accuracy (that fish keepers will appreciate), and the movie represents the best family film to-date of 2003. Read Full Review » -
83
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Dazzles us with computer-generated animation that has never looked quite so boldly exotic or shimmeringly beautiful. Read Full Review » -
80
-
80
The Onion (A.V. Club)
What's more impressive, and in the end more important, is the high standard of storytelling that Pixar continues to meet by locating both humor and emotional depth in worlds created out of lines of code. Read Full Review » -
80
Variety
Very clever and imaginative indeed, and its pictures are so gorgeous that they alone could warrant a second viewing. Read Full Review » -
80
Dallas Observer
The whole thing is absolutely beautiful to look at, even when it has a bad case of the cutes. Read Full Review » -
80
Los Angeles Times
The best break of all is that Pixar's traditionally untethered imagination can't be kept under wraps forever, and "Nemo" erupts with sea creatures that showcase Stanton and company's gift for character and peerless eye for skewering contemporary culture. Read Full Review » -
75
Philadelphia Inquirer
Though not as great as "Toy Story 2" and "Monsters, Inc.," Pixar movies that are the gold standard for family movies, Finding Nemo is visually entrancing. Read Full Review » -
70
The New Yorker
Finding Nemo is, as it happens, the most dangerously sugared of the Pixar productions to date--how could any father-finding-son saga be otherwise?--but the threat is now one of oversophistication. [9 June 2003, p. 108] Read Full Review » -
70
Salon.com
It's all beautiful, all right. But before long I began to feel beaten against the rocks of that beauty -- Finding Nemo smacks of looky-what-I-can-do virtuosity, and after the first 10 minutes or so, it's exhausting. Read Full Review » -
70
TV Guide
The colorful and kid-friendly characters are a delight, though very young children might be alarmed by some of the larger creatures, who tend to come into view teeth first. Read Full Review » -
50
Film Threat
After four Pixar features under their belts, it is painfully easy to see the clichés emerging. Read Full Review »
You Say
click on a star to rate
