People named Bruce—made antisocial, the argument goes, by the fact that not enough movie characters share their name—have another reason to come out of their shell: The Pixar-goes-piscine Finding Nemo features a ferocious Great White, named after the mechanical shark used in Jaws. (This Bruce also quotes from The Shining and Monty Python.) But whereas Bruce Almighty has one conceit, rotely fulfilled, Nemo is stuffed to the gills with surprises: Bruce, for all his terrifying teeth, is part of a 12-step program to abandon his carnivorous ways, and his terrifying relapse has him slamming into a submarine's innards for the catch of the day. It's an ocean of eye candy that tastes fresh even in this ADD-addled era of SpongeBob SquarePants.

The sturdy story, in which single-dad clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) and his son Nemo (Alexander Gould) are separated by a deep-sea-diving dentist who nets the latter for his office fishtank, is a well-crafted line on which to hang scores of lovely sequences: Surfaces shimmer with meticulous underwater light schemes, schools of fish so large (as the Yellow Submarine joke goes) they should be called universities scatter and coalesce as if ruled by a single mind, a jungle of jellyfish glows with weird menace and unearthly beauty. Twice unearthly—free of the land, and free of nature's hand. Anthropomorphized facial features notwithstanding, Finding Nemo's totalizing, computer-generated aesthetic (moments reminded me of Winged Migration) stirs up maker's mark questions that are at least a league deeper than anything proposed in Bruce Almighty's armchair religion.