When I first heard the notion that Finding Nemo and One Battle After Another had very similar plots, I scoffed. How can a great Pixar movie about fish be similar to Paul Thomas Anderson’s film about a revolutionary and his daughter? Well, it actually turns out the two projects have a whole lot in common, and after I heard Tyriq Withers explain all this, I can’t unsee the parallels.
Before we dive into Withers’ explanation, the second he asked if the people in the room knew that “One Battle After Another follows the same storyline as Finding Nemo,” something clicked for me. I fully realized that both these movies are about frazzled overprotective dads who will go to the ends of the Earth (or the ocean) to find their lost child. However, they have more in common than that, as Withers (who is currently starring in Reminders of Him) told EW:
