HOW come Hollywood's best comedy scripts are being thrown to the toys, the monsters and, now, the fish?

Billy The Fish, the heroic goalkeeping legend from Viz, had his own TV series; leaping salmon have made impressive contributions to natural history programmes; but a whole film about fish? Cod forbid, surely it could never catch on, but it did: Hollywood has gone fishing and Finding Nemo has been the biggest hit of the American summer.

Nemo, the white-striped clownfish with an under-sized fin and single-parent family status, is netted by divers, a rotten end to his first day at school as he is consigned to a dental office in Sydney.

Dad Marlin (voice, Albert Brooks) vows to rescue him. Fishful thinking it may seem, but neurotic, over-protective Marlin is always serious: so serious he can't tell a joke despite his clownfish name.

Off he goes on his ocean odyssey, a long journey in the tradition of Toy Story, with an initially irritating partner he grows to trust (just like Shrek and that donkey).

This companion is blue tang Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), whose short-term memory loss provides the best running gag here. All around, inventive ideas abound: look out for the synchronised-swimming school of fish; the seagulls with a vocabulary limited to one word; Barry Humphries' shark attending a Fish Eaters' Anonymous course; and a Great Escape spoof in the fish tank full of quirky anthropomorphic characters.

All that craft being poured into computerised animation and zipping dialogue has paid off for Disney/Pixar once more. Finding Nemo is a family adventure closer in spirit to Monsters.Inc than the snappier Toy Story but adults will still be as fulfilled as children, such is the panache of this comic enterprise. Not even Rick Stein can do this much with fish.

Updated: 13:00 Friday, October 10, 2003