'NEMO' A HIGH-WATER MARK FOR PIXAR'S ANIMATORS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

'FINDING NEMO'' is like a great scuba diving holiday without the getting-wet part. But with jokes. And with fish you really, really come to care about.

The latest computer-animated feature from Pixar is the company's best yet. It combines the psychological dimension of its ``Toy Story'' movies with the visual richness of ``A Bug's Life,'' while incorporating the wit and kinetic pizazz of ``Monsters, Inc.'' while stopping short of that film's frenzied action overload.

A lot happens in ``Nemo,'' but it unfolds with a confident elegance that allows us the time to savor each gag, every surprising character nuance and all of the awesome visual wonders that the ocean - as refracted through Pixar's increasingly nimble computers and the artists who command them - has to offer.

At the same time, this is no leisurely narrative paddle. Primal urgency is established from the get-go. After all, what is life in the sea basically about except eating and avoiding being eaten? Couple that with a father's quest to rescue his only child, enriched by underlying themes of growth and acceptance, and you've got a deceptively simple but profoundly resonant story line.

Terrific acting puts it across. Huh? Yes, this is a story about cartoon fish. But I really can't remember an animated feature in which the voice work sounded so accomplished, redolent with emotional subtleties and crack comic timing. Here's a case where the human element stands on gloriously equal footing with the technological marvels.

Albert Brooks voices the overprotective clownfish Marlin (running gag: he doesn't know how to tell a joke) whose boy, Nemo (Alexander Gould), is the only survivor of a barracuda attack that wiped out Marlin's wife and 399 of their eggs. Naturally, Marlin is worried about sending Nemo off to his first day of ``school,'' while the boyfish is equally tired of dad's controlling fretfulness.

In a huff, Nemo swims way too far from their colorful home reef - and is promptly plucked up by an Australian diver, who takes him back to the aquarium in his Sydney dental office. Hundreds, maybe thousands of watery miles away. And clownfish aren't very big.

Nevertheless, jittery Marlin sets out to save his son. Along the way, he encounters some rather confused but well-intentioned sharks (this scene's a scream), a pack of surfer-dude sea tortoises cruisin' a gnarly current, dangerous fields of stinger-laden jellyfish and very scary creatures in uncharted trenches, where the Pixar animators prove as deft with the simple cinematic qualities of light and inky darkness as they do elsewhere with popping coral colors.

Most gratifyingly, Marlin hooks up with Dory, a helpful blue tang with the unhelpful condition of short-term memory loss. Voiced brilliantly by Ellen DeGeneres, Dory is ever an upbeat, irrepressibly humorous antidote to Marlin's morose nellying. Yes, that's because she rarely has a realistic notion of how dire their situation is, but DeGeneres still manages to give the fish real poignance while never blowing the timing of a single line.

Nemo acquires his own surrogate family in the dentist's tank. Among these, Willem Dafoe's Gill, himself a wild fish who copes with captivity by plotting elaborately hopeless escapes, is the most memorable. With his own life on the line - one of those destructively geeky Pixar kids is looming - Nemo, with his stunted right fin, must find strength and courage his father never let him test.

Like that's going to help in such a hopeless situation. Of course, really bad things haven't happened to good toys, insects or monsters in the past, and there's no reason to believe fish will end up any worse for wear. Yet director Andrew Stanton and his crew keep a palpable air of suspense bubbling through even the most diverting moments of ``Finding Nemo.''

While that's one neat trick among many, the movie's crowning achievement is its convincing depiction of water. One of those notoriously difficult elements to re-create digitally, the wet stuff's qualities of movement, light and density are captured and played with in variation so dazzling it all but leaves you damp. And of course, the environment's dimension-spindling and gravity-shifting possibilities are exploited to the fullest.

Save money on that tropical holiday this year. Go see ``Finding Nemo'' instead.

FINDING NEMO - Four stars

(G: violence, fish in jeopardy)

Starring: Voices of Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Alexander Gould, Willem Dafoe, Geoffrey Rush.

Director: Andrew Stanton.

Running time: 1 hr. 44 min.

Playing: Wide release.

In a nutshell: Pixar tops itself with this visually splendid, computer-animated deep-sea adventure.

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Photo:

Marlin (Albert Brooks), left, and Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) team up to search for the former's son in ``Finding Nemo.''