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...