This week on Podcast Like It’s the 2000s, Phil and Emily continue their deep dive into Pixar’s 2000s run with Finding Nemo, joined by critic and writer Caroline Framke.

Released in 2003, Finding Nemo marked a major turning point for Pixar pairing cutting-edge animation with a surprisingly emotional story about parenthood, fear, and letting go. The group breaks down how revolutionary the film felt at the time, why it still holds up as one of Pixar’s most accessible crowd-pleasers, and how its influence reshaped both animation and merchandising culture in the years that followed.

They also dig into Albert Brooks’ anxious Marlin, Ellen DeGeneres’ instantly iconic Dory, the film’s surprisingly existential undertones, and the question of whether Finding Nemo has been culturally overshadowed by later Pixar classics or simply made to look “conventional” by its own success.

Along the way, the conversation touches on disability representation, Pixar’s evolving thematic ambitions, and why the ocean remains one of cinema’s most quietly terrifying settings.

You can find Caroline Framke at: www.carolineframke.com

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Phil and Emily head back to early-2000s Pixar with Monsters, Inc., a movie that feels deceptively simple until you realize how much emotional and thematic weight it’s quietly carrying. Joining them is Griffin Newman for a deep dive into why this film has endured as one of Pixar’s most humane, rewatchable achievements.

The conversation unpacks the movie’s elegant world-building, its labor-comedy roots, and how it turns corporate systems, energy consumption, and fear itself into something legible for kids without flattening the ideas for adults. They talk Sulley as an unusually gentle Pixar protagonist, Mike Wazowski as both comic engine and emotional fulcrum, and Boo as a character whose impact far outweighs her screen time.

They also explore where Monsters, Inc. sits in Pixar’s creative timeline, how its humor is engineered, why its ending lands as hard as it does, and how the film reflects early-2000s anxieties about work, productivity, and empathy. Along the way, the group discusses the studio’s voice-casting philosophy, the film’s visual softness compared to later Pixar titles, and why its central message still plays cleanly more than two decades later.

Whether this was your childhood Pixar favorite or one you’ve come to appreciate more as an adult, this episode reframes Monsters, Inc. as a quietly radical movie about fear, care, and choosing connection over efficiency.

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Every year on Podcast Like It’s the 2000s, Phil and Emily pick one Chaos Pick a movie that doesn’t quite fit into any miniseries, but demands to be talked about anyway. This year’s selection is Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the ambitious 2004 pulp-sci-fi experiment that looked like the future of filmmaking… and then quietly disappeared.

Joining the conversation is Emma Stefansky, here to passionately defend Kerry Conran’s retro-futurist spectacle starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Angelina Jolie. The group digs into the film’s groundbreaking all-digital production, its sepia-toned visual language, and why it feels like a volume-stage movie years before volume stages became standard. They also explore how Sky Captain fits into a lineage of stylized adventure films like Dick Tracy and The Rocketeer, and why audiences often remember how the movie looked more than what actually happens in it.

Along the way, they discuss Roger Ebert’s glowing four-star review, the film’s middling box office and critical afterlife, the risks of resurrecting actors digitally, and whether Sky Captain is a misunderstood cult object or simply a fascinating near-miss. It’s a conversation about ambition, technology, and the strange movies that briefly convince us we’re looking at the future right before the future changes again.

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