Finding Nemo: Psychological Profiles of Its Characters

We all know the popular family movie “Finding Nemo” a kid’s movie that tells a journey of Marlin, a father clown fish, who crosses the vast ocean to find his son Nemo. During Marlin’s journey he comes across many new and scary things, but like any good children’s movie Marlin does eventually find his son Nemo and they go back home and live happily ever after. This all sounds good right? Wrong! Looking at this movie from a psychologist point of view, or in my case a psychology students’ point of view you slowly begin to realize from the moment the movie starts each and every one of the characters in this lovely kids movie is kind of messed up in their own special way.

The first character that I would like to talk about is Marlin. Marlin is Nemo’s dad. He is a great father but a little controlling. What I mean is Marlin has his set routines that both he and everyone in his family must follow. I believe Marlin suffers from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) (pg. 639). OCD is a mental disorder in which people have anxiety when certain things in their daily lives are not done to their mental standards. For example many people have these anxieties if their desks are not organized, if they did not check to see if a door was locked X amount of times before they left the house, or even if they didn’t have a chance to wash their hands X amount of times after they completed any daily activity. These anxieties are caused because this individual believes some irrational thing will happen if they do not complete the task the way they believe it should be completed. In simpler terms, an individual believes that if they don’t check the door repeatedly it could somehow become unlooked and a stranger could steal from their house, or if that indi...

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...ing asked, thinks that it is only a little worse than the previous so why not do it. This was how Gill got Nemo to put the stone in the cleaning tank by slowly asking Nemo questions about himself, then about his father, if he wanted to see him again, and then finally can you go into this dangerous machine because if you do you can see your father again.

As you can see the characters in Finding Nemo make very good examples on the psychology concept that we learned this semester. Not only did the character help show real life scenarios of common mental disorder but so did the situations they were put in. Science is all around us, there is no difference with the science of psychology you just have to be willing to look hard enough to see it.

Works Cited

Myers, D. G. (2013). Psychology: Tenth Edition in Modules. New York: Worth Publishers. Retrieved May 5th, 2013