Finding Nemo - Losing Us

"Well. Just got back from seeing Finding Nemo with the kids. This one has got to be the all-time greatest father's rights propaganda Disney has ever put out. The story line:

An egalitarian couple of parents-to-be clown fish gaze lovingly over their 400 eggs. They talk to them and call them their children, and little fishes can be seen inside. They argue about names.

Mother-to-be fish whines about the new neighborhood they've just moved into, chosen by father-to-be fish, because it's too fancy, the digs are too spacious. But father-to-be fish is into providing more generously than necessary.

Mother-to-be fish doesn't heed father-to-be fish's advice, leaves herself in danger, and ends up dead, along with 399 baby-fishes-to-be herein referred to as "children." (So far, traditional Disney beginning with an extra pro-life twist.)

Father-to-be fish rescues his one remaining "child." Fast-forward the kid is 5, it's his first day of school, and father fish does the stereotypical overprotective mother thing. We learn that child fish was born with a birth defect, one bad fin, as a result of the former tragedy.

At fish preschool, all the parents and the teacher are male. They pratter on in an offensive take-off of stereotypical cartoonish mother-pratter. Father fish exhibits his qualms, fears and sadness about leaving child fish, more overprotective mother crap. The propaganda is done so well and so subliminally that I doubt whether it enters the consciousness of most viewers that there is Not One Mother In The Entire Movie After the mother fish is killed. There are lots of parent fish figures, not one female.

Child fish rebels against overprotective father fish, tells him he hates him, swims away, and gets netted by a diver, taken away for a fish tank, thereby teaching child fish one hell of a lesson following his parental alienation syndrome. The bulk of the rest of the movie consists of the travels of father fish determined to retrieve him, never giving up.

Along the way, father fish meets ditzy, homely, lonely and looking for love female blue fish, the comic relief, Ellen Degeneres, and an obvious Ellen Degeneres. She has some kind of short-term memory problem, brain dementia. Father fish never takes her seriously, she kind of hangs with him, and he even tries to dump her a couple of times totally bumming her out (she wants to be his friend and this never happens and she clings professing teary friendship, apparently platonic

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