Though my own biological clock is averse to following suit, I admit to a certain degree of gratitude that so many of my friends are producing offspring these days. While I content myself with Turner Classic Movies’ recent Bollywood programming or take in curve-antecedent fare at the Saugatuck Film Festival, my fertile pals keep me abreast of the G-rated scene. (Thank heavens none of them are insisting the latest Pokemon sequels deserve coverage.) Predictably, it’s typically only in exotic instances such as Spirited Away that I’ll make an effort to partake of the “kid’s stuff”; only a couple weeks ago did I finally catch a glimpse of Monsters, Inc. at the home of some former schoolmates looking to distract their two progeny, and I was further convinced that the folks at Pixar can do no wrong. (Truth be told, we only watched the first hour or so of the film until the tots were put to bed; were I among the hapless “enemy combatants” from Afghanistan still detained at Guantanamo Bay, I bet my interrogators would’ve figured out that only partially watching quality films constitutes an effective method of torture. Thanks a lot guys!)

Continuing Pixar’s streak of perfection is Finding Nemo, this summer’s breakaway hit and further proof the best films can still be an all-ages phenomenon. Effectively equating the vast oceans and their limitless dangers with the minefield that is the job of parenting, Nemo casts famous worrywart Albert Brooks as the ichthyological version of the harried single parent. After all but one of his eggs, and his wife, are consumed by a visiting predator, Marlin the clownfish becomes understandably over-protective of his sole surviving son, Nemo. (He also ends up such a fussbudget that, contrary to the clownfish’s reputation for being hilarious, Marlin can’t tell a single decent joke.)

Swearing “I promise I will never let anything happen to you,” Marlin stays close as Nemo sets out for his first day of fish school on the Great Barrier Reef, constantly reminding him of his First Rule of the Ocean: “It’s not safe.” It doesn’t help that one of Nemo’s fins is underdeveloped – though they call it his “lucky fin,” it only convinces Marlin further that he needs constant supervision. (Could be worse, Nemo could be like his seahorse classmate – “H2O intolerant.”)

Despite infrequent incursions from unfriendly elements such as the dentally-gifted marauder that devoured Nemo’s siblings, life on the reef is nothing less than idyllic, and Pixar’s digital wizardry perpetually astonishes, from Marlin’s anemone habitat to the view of the sun or moon from beneath the surface. Nemo’s visual engineers have concocted a virtual depth of field, an unending variety of sea life, and an uncanny simulacrum of aquatic textures that keep the eye unceasingly mesmerized. The achievement cannot be understated; from the forest of glowing jellyfish that descends upon our travelers to the translucent teeth of a bottom-dwelling monstrosity, from the skins of every fish that passes by to even the rusty surface of a simple buoy, Pixar’s attention to detail will not fail to impress child and parent.

As in their previous releases like the Toy Story series and Monsters, Inc., their representations of humanity are markedly more cartoonish, but here we can excuse it as the best the fishes’ own eyes can apprehend those massive bipeds who inexplicably want to imprison them in aquaria. (One homo sapien in particular, the “fish killer” Darla, resembles to no small degree a Garbage Pail Kid™.)

Despite Marlin’s hypervigilant parental instincts, kids will still be kids, and Nemo ventures off the reef to impress his new classmates, his undersized “lucky fin” propelling underneath a nearby boat. He’s snatched on the way back by a scuba diver, though, a Sydney dentist who collects tropical fish, and Marlin can only watch as his last remaining kin is whisked away to parts unknown. His only clue as to his son’s whereabouts is a pair of diving goggles that fell off the boat, with an address inscribed upon the strap. “I can’t read human!” he laments, but he crosses paths with someone who can – Dorrie, a Regal Blue Tang who’s more than willing to help. That is, until she forgets she was willing to help. She’s got “short-term memory loss,” you see, and she forgets things almost instantly. It’s a Memento-like predicament that would try most anyone’s patience (Dorrie even forgets she knows how to read), but it’s also a scenario ripe for drollery. (Wait – what’s that I hear? It’s the sound of a casting coup – Dorrie is voiced by Ellen Degeneres, whose own comedy routines have always relied upon earnest-but-slightly-dizzy vocal deliveries.) Just wait for when the duo descends into a pitch-black trench to find the goggles, and Dorrie soon wonders who that other voice belongs to.

I guess without a steady stream of challenges you wouldn’t have much of a movie, but Nemo’s creators admirably keep one foot firmly in reality by presenting a vast aquatic realm constantly fraught with peril for two tiny fish. There’s a trio of liberally-enfanged sharks struggling to improve their species’ image by adhering to vegetarianism (they attend support group meeting and pledge they’re “not mindless eating machines”), sunken subs with anchored mines all about, the “Ring of Fire” with its swarm of stinging jellyfish, unspeakable bogey-fish trolling the lower depths (whose ferocious features may be a bit much for the youngest viewers), and voracious and tongued whales whose innards are so vast as to comprise a world unto itself. If Marlin needed any further proof the ocean presents sufficient threats, his journey in search of his child more than does the job; it’s Dorrie’s unremitting optimism (it’s easy to think positive when you never remember the scrapes you barely survived minutes ago) that propels them toward their destination against all odds.

There are also plenty of kinder souls along the way, like schools of fish that do collective impressions, thrill-seeking turtles riding the submarine currents like extreme surfers, swordfish who pass the time duelling, and it also happens that Dorrie speaks whale. (Or thinks she does – get ready to pee your pants over her attempts.) the members of the non-human kingdom to get the shortest end of the anthropomorphic stick are seagulls, made out to be mindless armies of fish-eaters with a one-word vocabulary: “Mine!” Seems accurate enough to me.

Meanwhile, Nemo finds himself in a capacious aquarium in that dentist’s office, and he’s far from alone. From a French-speaking crab to a starfish bought off eBay, from an excitable blowfish to a neat-freak piscine variety obsessed with bubbles, Nemo’s new colleagues appear to be led by the edge and mangled Gill, a brooding type determined to somehow escape their quarters. (He’s voiced by Willem Dafoe, which is sufficient to communicate to you Gill’s dour character.) Though Gill’s bold ideas all too often meet with failure, when word reaches the gang (via a pelican who often visits to critique the dentist’s technique) that Nemo’s father has braved countless hazards to reach Sydney Harbour, they’re all determined to get the tyke out of there before their captor’s reckless niece Darla comes to claim him for her own tank elsewhere.

Once the endless unveiling of visual marvels gets easier to take for granted, like the whale’s internal wave machine or the “scum angels” Nemo’s pals make on the glass when their filter breaks, the script starts driving its point home. Though Gill insists “fish aren’t meant to be in a box – it does things to you,” this isn’t an anti-aquarium tract, but rather an acknowledgement of the inexact science of child-rearing; it’s like how Dorrie counsels Marlin to lengthen Nemo’s tether in the future, saying “you can’t never let anything happen to him – then nothing will ever happen to him.” Marlin parries with “how do you know something bad’s not going to happen?” “I don’t,” she replies, summing up the entirety of the child-development-book industry.

Just like wondering if one’s child can handle the sight of the sharks’ teeth as they come into view behind our heroes, there’s just no telling when kids are ready for the big bad world – but we all dove in at some point, and if you’re not reading this wrapped up in a straightjacket somewhere, it’s a safe bet you dealt with it just fine. What you may not be prepared for is the extent Degeneres steals the show, or just how touching it gets at the end, or how Pixar can capture lightning in a bottle over and over, but there are worse problems to have. For all my parenting peers whose radar is always scanning for potential calamities, Nemo will serve as the most agreeable respite of the summer.

Of course, it’s rare that parenting doesn’t feel like the most thankless job on the planet, and when films address this eternal generation gap they’re wisely appealing to audiences of all ages with movie dollars to blow. Local Boys opened the Saugatuck Film Festival earlier this summer, and was recently released on video, and proves a cogent flipside to Nemo by exploring the consequences when it’s the father figure who’s absent. Boys is also no less entranced with the ocean, as the events take place in Southern California among the surfer subculture. It’s always been a world devoid of charms for the perpetually-pale like myself, but director/writers Ron Moler, Douglas Bradley, and Thomas Stewart have fashioned a solid indie that succeeded in keeping about a thousand people in their folding chairs after dark on a Thursday night on a city street, no small feat when your budget allows for no CGI.

On paper, the workings of the plot differ little from your average TV movie: two brothers, the eldest just out of high school, continue to deal with their policeman father’s untimely death while on duty a couple years ago, the youngest boy’s anxiety occasionally manifesting itself in ill-timed panic attacks. Randy, the older of the two and already featured once on the cover of Surfing magazine due to his amateur prowess, contemplates a professional surfing career but has to deal with such mundane problems as bullying hoodlums who stole his board. The younger Skeet is trying to learn on his own the ropes of riding “sick” waves, but he then comes under the tutelage of Jim Wesley, a local mechanic who just so happens to have been an international surfing legend years ago until he lost his wife and daughter in a car crash. When Jim meets their mom, romance is in the air, but Randy’s resistant to the idea of his deceased dad being replaced so quickly, and so begins the process of everyone working out their issues before the camera.

Oftentimes it’s not the prosaicness of a film’s subject mater that makes or breaks it; its excellence instead derives from how deftly it navigates the rules it’s established for itself. At the beginning we’re simply marking elements off a predictable checklist: love interest for Randy – check, high school buddy with drug problem – check, mom’s poor choices in dates before she meets Wesley – check. But once the stakes of the drama are established, we wait to see if the film makes any false moves en route to its resolutions. We don’t ask for greatness at all times, just an emotional truth and a narrative plausibility that maintains our sympathy with the characters, and as we try to figure exactly why Wesley has taken Skeet under his wing, and why he later disappears altogether, we’re carried along by our attempts to get into everyone’s heads.

Local Boys earns big points when we can see that Eric Christian Olsen (as Randy) and Jeremy Sumpter (Skeet) and Mark Harmon (Wesley) are doing their own surfing feats; the absence of anonymous stunt doubles in long shots helps keep it real, and also feeds our interest in the sport itself. Where many of us may not identify is the whole laid-back “surf bum” ethic that would be hard pressed to take hold here in the Midwest, but when Randy and his pals ruminate over what to do with their lives now that high school’s over, you’ll see at least a snippet of your own former (or current) existential musings. Randy’s being “mad all the time” certainly resembles not a few of our own adolescent phases, and though the final violent reconciliation between several of the parties might feel a little maudlin and forced, it’s possible that Randy did indeed just need someone to force a hug on him. Why not? I coulda used a few myself at that age.

Their revenge on the surfboard thieves also comes off a bit too cleanly, but by this point the film’s hit enough of its targets we can cut them a little slack. What Local Boys gets right is how it’s all about family, the one aspect of life whose influence no one can avoid, either by its presence or its absence. And though both Nemo’s Marlin and Boys’ Wesley may discover the paternal roles they’ve inherited are vaguely defined at best, we’ll take our mentors however we can get them. Boys’ tagline is "Dream the Extreme,” which may mean to refer to the sport of surfing, but with all the family struggles out there, sometimes just getting in some quality time with your loved ones is an extreme enough dream.