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The Great Barrier Reef, the present. Clownfish Marlin and Coral's happiness is cut short when Coral and 399 or so of their children are wiped out by a barracuda. Marlin becomes overprotective of his sole surviving son Nemo. Stung by his father's observation that he's not a strong swimmer, Nemo sets out for a boat on a dare and is captured by a diver, a Sydney-based dentist named Sherman, who relocates him to his office aquarium.

Marlin sets off to look for Nemo, joined by Dory, a regal blue tang with a short memory span. They have a run-in with some sharks, swim to the ocean depths and stray into a school of jellyfish where Dory is almost fatally stung. Rescued by turtles, Marlin and Dory hitch a ride along the East Australian current with a sea turtle, Crush. After being swallowed by a whale, Marlin and Dory escape up his spout to find themselves in Sydney Harbour.

Meanwhile, Nemo has befriended the other denizens of the tank, who are led by scarred Moorish idol Gill. When they learn that Sherman plans to give Nemo to his fish-killing niece Daria, Gill and the others plot Nemo's escape, which involves getting near the window where he can make a bolt for the harbour. A pelican, Nigel, will help him. Eventually Nigel meets Marlin and Dory during his travels between the office and the harbour and acts as a go-between. Although the escape doesn't quite go to plan, Nemo breaks out through the sewage system into the harbour where he meets Dory, who has forgotten she was looking for him. Marlin has become entangled in a net, but Dory and Nemo save him. Reunited, father and son return to the Great Barrier Reef.

Technically Finding Nemo offers the requisite benchmark advances in computer animation on the previous features from Pixar Studios. It has become expected that with each new movie the company shows off its mastery of a new challenge. In Toy Story it was its rendering of, among other things, computer-modelled movement, in A Bug's Life it was light, in Monsters, Inc. it was fur. And here it is water, a high-tide mark of animation skill handled with extraordinary precision in all its aspects, from choppy surfaces to the inkiest murk.

The underwater universe where most of the film is set is a ravishing panorama of iridescent colours and shifting shapes, pierced by shafts of limpid sunlight. Employing a degree of detail that will go unnoticed by most viewers, the animation department even dapples in briny flecks of micro particles, while the aquatic characters move exactly as they ought, pushing through the variously coloured waters. One could pay it no greater compliment than to say, when it comes to the backgrounds, you often forget you're watching an animated movie.

However, the narrative is fractionally less rich than Pixar's previous efforts, despite the fact that the film is directed by one of the company's top scriptwriters, Andrew Stanton (who also co-directed A Bug's Life). More conventional is its quest theme and more didactic in delivering its lessons about letting children discover their own limits. Finding Nemo lacks the subtlety of, say, Toy Story and Toy Story 2. Those films have more of the sublime about them, even though Nemo more directly confronts the issue of loss with the Bambi-like death of the mother in the first reel.

Still, Nemo creates an awe-inducing sense of the infinite in its watery vistas, more forbidding than the quotidian roads of the Toy Story films or the factory of Monsters, Inc. But the dangers that lurk at every turn tend towards the abstract, and the film lacks a villain to compare with the nefarious grasshopper Hopper in A Bug's Life. Although introduced with a clichéd stab of Psycho-style strings, little Daria, the dentist's niece with a bad track record in fish maintenance, has none of the psychopathic qualities of Toy Story's toy-torturer Sid.

Finding Nemo is so polished a film, you almost take its show of skill for granted. Certainly it's better than US studios' recent traditionally animated efforts, including DreamWorks' leaden Sinbad or Disney's back-catalogue cash-in The Jungle Book 2. And yet, partly spurred by Pixar's success, feature animation has experienced a renewed vigour, with such recent masterworks as Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away and Sylvain Chomet's Belleville Rendezvous both made mostly with traditional 2D animation. These are the work of animators who are pushing upstream towards innovation. Finding Nemo, for all its qualities, seems to be coasting in safer waters.

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