Finding Nemo Everywhere

January 17, 2008

So I am getting my mind around the fact that I will be watching kids movies a lot more in the future. A couple of weeks back I watched Finding Nemo.. which everyone probably remembers as the cute Disney/Pixar film in which a daddy clown fish goes looking for his son. This quest takes the daddy on an extended road trip that is driven forward by colorful encounters in the ocean world.

Watching Finding Nemo I began to imagine its composition. I am suspicious about how almost everything I know about the ocean found a place in the storyline. If I were sitting around trying to think of what fun events could happen to a fish in the ocean, I might take out a pad of paper and start to brainstorm: the colorful fish that swim around a reef, sharks, shipwrecks, jellyfish, schools of fish, turtles, sea currents, those strange fish that live deep deep in the ocean. Once these events/settings were sketched, it would be relatively easy to string them together into an episodic story.

The episodic story (as are many travel narratives) lends itself to this approach. Maybe I am writing a story about a woman searching for someone in Los Angeles. I could play it straight and emphasize a linear plot.. in which case the settings would be functional. Or I might opt for an episodic story that forms around several iconic sites in Los Angeles. If I were to take this latter option, I might well sit around and plot out the sites that would be of most interest. Perhaps I even felt that my real goal was not to tell a straight story, but to give viewers a tour of the best sites in Los Angeles. In that case I would really focus on getting the sites right.

I think this manner of composition could help make sense of a novel like The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. Reading this work I was struck by how all kinds of antiquarian landscape forms found their way into the storyline. I don't think that kind of effect is just luck. It makes sense to talk about a method of composition and story imagining that allows for the forefronting of a group of scene types. Imagine Cooper asking himself: "What are the elements in this American landscape that people are most curious about?" The result turns out to be an episodic story that allows each one to receive an explanation. A story thus becomes an alternative way of writing about a place.