Best Animated Movies Ever

Best Animated Movies Ever

Nemo is quite likely long dead and his great-great-great-grandchildren doing school projects about him'

Finding Nemo (2003)

Columnist Steve Royle gets all nostalgic about the birth of his daughter 16 years and looks at how things have changed.

My eldest daughter turned 16 last weekend. It’s a cliché, but they grow up so fast.

It doesn’t seem like two minutes ago that I was chasing an ambulance containing my wife and unborn child up the M6 from Chorley to Sharoe Green after various methods of inducement had failed.

It was snowing that night in 2003, and I announced to the world that I had become a dad by writing the news in the snow on my front lawn.

Those were the days before Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, folks.

If people liked my news they had to make a concerted effort to tell me, they couldn’t just click a button.

Congratulations came in the form of a card or letter, not on a social media post.

The big film of 2003 was Finding Nemo, and I’ve just looked at the average life span of a clown fish (three to six years).

That means Nemo is quite likely long dead and his great-great-great-grandchildren doing school projects about him and his amazing survival story.

My daughter’s rapid growth has been echoed by technology.

Televisions have got thinner, while we all seem to get fatter.

Channels have multiplied quicker than fruit flies in a school science lab.

Mobile phones got smaller then got bigger again.

If you were ‘smart’ in 2003 you looked well groomed, these days it means your house has Wi-Fi to the max. Being ‘sick’ was a bad thing and ‘hash tags’ were the remnants of illegal cigarettes.

The worst thing about having a 16-year-old child, however, is that she looks at me in the same way I used to look at my mum and dad.

I know what that look means, it means she can’t believe how stupid and uncool I am. (Even using the word ‘uncool’ is probably uncool these days?)

What she doesn’t realise is that I remember being 16.

To her that is literally a lifetime ago (eh, kids look how I used the word ‘literally’ correctly). All I could think about when I was 16 was the opposite sex.

Now my daughter is 16 I hope beyond all reason that young men have changed as much as technology.

Girls at 16 are very different to lads, all they can think about is make-up and cream.

My wife has obsessions with these commodities, too, but for contrasting reasons.

My daughter wears make-up to look older, my wife wears make-up to appear younger.

I wear make-up for pantomime.

Nobody knows what will happen in the next 16 years of her life.

Will we have left Europe by then?

Will we be back in Europe by then?

Will there even be a Europe?

Will the word ‘Brexit’ finally be forgotten?

Will Gemma Collins have learnt to ice skate?

The only thing I can guarantee is that I’ll still love that little baby that changed my life forever in 2003.

Thank you, Daisy, and thank you my wife.

02

Keanu Reeves’ Top-Secret ‘Toy Story 4’ Character May Have Appeared In ‘Incredibles 2’

Pixar / Disney

One of the joys of watching a Pixar movie is seeing references to the studio’s other films. Think: the Pizza Planet delivery truck in WALL-E, or A Bug’s Life toys in Toy Story 2. Sometimes, Pixar will even introduce new characters for films that haven’t even been released yet, like Nemo from Finding Nemo (2003) in Monsters, Inc. (2001) or no-good Lotso from Toy Story 3 (2010) in Up (2009). That last example is an interesting case, because it appears Pixar may have once again hidden the villain, in this case for Toy Story 4, in a previous film.

Before the release of Incredibles 2, sets supervisor Nathan Fariss told BuzzFeed that there’s a Toy Story 4 Easter egg hidden somewhere in the movie, but “it probably won’t make any sense until Toy Story 4 comes out. I didn’t even know anything about it before. You might see it and go, ‘What the heck is that?’ And then move on.” Based on the Nemo and Lotso examples, we can assume it’s a pivotal character, and we know it’s Forky or Ducky and Bunny, because we’ve already seen them. But there’s one major character we haven’t been introduced to yet: Duke Kaboom, voiced by Keanu Reeves.

The Observer reports that the horse-riding John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum star “is playing a character named Duke Kaboom, who hails from a place where discontinued toys are sent… Apparently, Bo Peep (voiced by Annie Potts) seeks out his help in retrieving her sheep after they’ve been taken from her.” Reeves has since confirmed the news, adding that Pixar “pitched the character to me and then we spoke and they allowed me to kind of riff on it.” Pixar has otherwise remained mum on Duke’s role in the film, but a convincing YouTube video suggests he’s the secret Easter egg in Incredibles 2, appearing in Jack-Jack’s crib while surrounded by blocks reading “W,” “D,” and “Y,” or Woody.

PIXAR

PIXAR

Look at that handlebar mustache: that toy has to be important and/or evil! But I guess we’ll find out on June 21, when Toy Story 4 comes out.

(Via BuzzFeed and Seamus Gorman)

03

After ‘Finding Nemo,’ clownfish challenged by stardom, climate change

"After the film 'Finding Nemo,' there was a drastic spike in the number of fish people wanted for their aquarium," said Karen Burke da Silva, a marine biologist and the co-founder of a program called Saving Nemo. “And the places that they were getting those fish was actually from the wild. As the numbers kept coming out of the wild, they started getting very, very small in some places and in fact, in certain areas, became locally extinct."

Best Animated Movies Ever.