By now, we’ve all heard of or seen Pixar’s lat­est ani­mated hit, Find­ing Nemo. The story, while extremely sim­plis­tic is geni­une in its exe­cu­tion and pro­vides plenty of eye candy for moviegoers.

Accord­ing to USAtoday.com (spe­cial thanks to my Dad for the link), Nemo ranked in $70.6 mil­lion dol­lars in its open­ing week­end smash­ing Matrix Reoloaded to the next spot in the Box Office heirar­chy. Dis­ney should be proud that they have such a suc­cess­ful out­fit crank­ing out the hits for them because as of late there hasn’t been an ani­mated block­buster (aside from Pixar’s fea­tures) to come out of the Mouse House. Why? It’s sim­ple, really. Dis­ney needs to find itself again and rework the for­mula that worked so well for movies like Cin­derella, Sleep­ing Beauty and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Was that for­mula only exis­tent with Walt’s direc­tion and vision? Maybe.

Lately, the Dis­ney ani­mated movies have been formula-driven. There exe­cu­tion has been mediocre if not watered down and the scripts have been lack­ing sub­stance. It’s eas­ily said that Dis­ney has fallen short of it’s expec­ta­tions and rather focuses on 3-Dimensional graph­ics to lead the way. In the Aston­ish Fac­tory forums, it was said that the CGI isn’t at fault but the sto­ries and char­ac­ter inter­ac­tions. If there is one thing Pixar is known for, it’s their bril­liantly writ­ten scripts and direc­tors. You can’t build your foun­da­tion on bits and bytes entirely, you also need the brains and a few hearty indi­vid­u­als will­ing to pour out their comedic soul.