One of my favorite stories to tell is about the time that I got so excited to watch “Finding Nemo” as a toddler that I fell down my stairs and got the wind knocked out of me. I couldn’t have been older than 5 years old, yet I remember it vividly. We had watched the first part of the movie the night before, and I marched from my bedroom doorway to the top of my stairs, yelling out with each step: “Let’s! Go! Watch! Some! More! Nemo!” The next thing I knew, I had missed a step and was on my hardwood floor. I was crying and couldn’t breathe, but my dad carried me into the family room and put the movie on. It didn’t take long after the animated fish reappeared on the screen for me to forget the pain I was in only minutes before.
“Finding Nemo” was the first movie I ever saw in theaters, or so I’m told. The film came out in May of 2003, which meant I would have been 2 years old when my parents took me to see it. Sure, I may not have been old enough to truly understand what was going on, but the stunning animation of underwater life and Thomas Newman’s even more gorgeous score could captivate people of any age. To this day, it is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I firmly believe that it’s because of it being my first — even if I don’t remember it.
When I say that this movie has been a formative part of my life, I mean it. I’ve seen it so many times that I have a majority of it memorized. Lines like “I’ll pick you up after school!” have been integrated into my family’s day-to-day vocabulary, and my private Snapchat story is named “yes I’m a natural blue,” after a quote from Dory. I know weird trivia about the film, like the fact that Pixar’s art team had to take marine biology classes in order to ensure that the animation looked accurate. Nemo is my Disney+ profile avatar. I remember watching the last minute of the movie over and over again in order to make myself cry (I was 11, and I have no idea why I did this.) “Nemo” was the first film that we watched after we got a new TV and a Blu-Ray player, and I imagine that my reaction to seeing the underwater animation then is exactly how my 2-year-old self saw it for the first time on the big screen. I held hands with a boy for the first time while watching this movie.
I’ve always associated random parts of my personality with my early introduction to “Nemo” — my love for marine life and obsession with film scores, for example. As I’m writing this piece, it occurs to me that I can see my relationship with my parents reflected in the movie as well, though not in the way you might think.
I’ve struggled with anxiety for a majority of my life, and being near one or both of my parents always made me feel safer. But at times, they became a crutch, and I would panic even if my friends and I went to the movies by ourselves. My version of crossing the ocean was going away to college for the first time. While I had mostly gotten my anxiety under control in high school, I was still not mentally prepared for such a big transition, mostly because I had never been completely independent like this. Maybe I was more like Marlin than Nemo — I was the one holding on so tightly to my family, instead of them holding on tightly to me.
My freshman year, I spent the majority of my time holed up in my dorm. My nerves were always at an all-time high, making it difficult some days even to go to class and eat — the only two things I did, anyway. Of course, I had a digital copy of “Nemo” on my laptop; I watched it from my bed during one of my first few weeks on campus. There’s a scene where Nemo is sitting inside a tiny diver’s helmet, very clearly depressed. I remember taking a picture of his sad little face because that’s how I felt at the time.
While I may have been far away from my parents, I was never completely alone. I called them almost every morning while I walked to and from my classes, and my dad was always willing to pick me up and take me home for a weekend (which was often). But I was definitely lost, drowning in an ocean of people who all seemed much happier than I was to be there.
On one of our usually-tearful drives back to campus towards the end of the year, I told my dad that I didn’t want to come back in the fall. Though I’d been saying the same thing basically since I first arrived, now I had the experience under my belt to know that this school wasn’t for me. I was terrified to say it out loud, since it felt a little like failure. Everyone goes to college — why wasn’t I happy? But instead of telling me to stick it out some more, my dad was fully supportive, proud of me for trying and ready to help me figure out my next steps. I broke down, this time out of relief.
Since that fateful drive, I have been through many other firsts — a global pandemic, new jobs and, of course, a new school. This time, I was ready to be on my own, and I’d like to think I’ve made the most of my time here at the University of Michigan. I still call my parents occasionally when I walk to class, not because I’m miserable, but because I miss them. They’re happy that I’m happy, and when I do come home for the occasional weekend, I’m sure they’re glad it’s a much shorter drive to pick me up. (Love you, Dad.) The gratitude I feel for them and for my journey cannot be described.
Naturally, “Nemo” has been there through these firsts, too. My friends and roommates are very familiar with my love for the film — they insist I am Baby Dory, not Marlin. For Spring Break this year, I went to Disney World, where I got a Nemo T-shirt, a plushie and several pressed pennies. I’ve watched the movie in my off-campus living room, holding hands with a different boy. The ending now makes me cry without needing to rewind. I have many more firsts on the horizon, many more oceans that need crossing, but at least I’ve got my favorite people in my corner and my favorite movie at my fingertips.
Daily Arts Writer Hannah Carapellotti can be reached at hmcarp@umich.edu.