Hook, Line and Thinker

They're only toys: cuddly cloth cowboys, adorable insects, furry monsters. But when the pixilated storytellers at Pixar fashion them, these playthings come to life. Take Marlin, the single-dad clown fish, voiced by Albert Brooks, in the new Pixar astonishment Finding Nemo. Brooks says that when a reporter on a junket described this fish father as overprotective, "I stood up and said, 'Overprotective? If your wife and almost all your children were eaten by a shark, you wouldn't be overprotective?' Then I realized--I'm yelling about a fish."

Of course, Marlin is not even a fish. He's a computer-generated image attached to a famously fretful voice. But Marlin has all-too-human qualities: insecurity, suspiciousness, giant wrinkles of worry and a lot of saving heart. Endearing flaws like these, along with an unmatched graphic elegance and elfin wit, have made Pixar's first four features--Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc.--the gold standard in computer-generated imagination. Gold, as in $1.73 billion worldwide gross for that quartet, plus truckfuls more in video and DVD profits. Pixar owner Steve Jobs will need a battleship to hold all the money his current distribution partner, Disney, will need to fork over to renew their contract, which expires in 2005. The two studios now split the profits from Pixar movies, but since Pixar's CGI movies have been grossing nearly twice what the Mouse House's own animated films take in, Jobs wants a more grownup portion of the money.

While the Pixarians aren't really boys, they are guys (all the top creative types are male) who radiate a benign youthfulness. The company, with headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., outside San Francisco, is a giant playpen, a kind of Erector-set tree house. Games and gadgets clog the office of head Pixie John Lasseter, whose uniform is a blindingly gaudy Hawaiian shirt. Nemo's begetter, Andrew Stanton, 37, looks a dozen years younger and decades more innocent. He, Lasseter and the rest seem like boys in love with their computer toys.

But these seraphic-faced artists are working stiffs and parents too. The Toy Story tandem and A Bug's Life were clever parables of workplace camaraderie. And the two most recent Pixar films are stories of not-quite-mature men (in the guise of monsters or clown fish) who learn the onerous joys of fatherhood. Like many classic Disney cartoons, and Spielberg fables, Finding Nemo is about the traumatic separation of a child from his parent. The refreshing difference here is that Nemo dramatizes the anxiety (and adventures) a parent undergoes searching for his wayward, precious kid.