Our leader – a cartoon fish

by Julia Wolf

One of this office’s favorite hobbies is to quote movies. Most of the time, the quotes go right over my head.

I’m just not a big movie watcher, books are more my thing and most of the time, that’s just fine.

Sometimes, it backfires a little bit.

During college, I took a leadership class. They tried not to make the class too time-consuming outside of our meeting time, since it was only one credit.

One of the projects for the class, was to write a paper on a time we saw leadership demonstrated by a movie character, based on things we read about leadership styles earlier in the year. We also gave a presentation on our findings, after showing a clip of the movie.

I’m sure we had to break down the types of leadership we saw, but I can’t remember. It’s been a while since the class.

Well, I didn’t feel like trying to find a movie and hoping it had a character worthy of writing about in it. So, I started thinking of which movies I had watched in the semi-recent past that I could write about.

All I was coming up with was Finding Nemo. I hadn’t seen the movie, at that point, for about three years, but have no fear. One of the kids I babysat when I was in high school loved that movie and watched it while I was there, probably 80 bazillion times (as much as little boys sit still and watch anything).

At the very least, it was playing in the background while I was in the house.

Is Finding Nemo a cute movie? Yes. Is it less cute after the first 50 times you see it? Also, yes.

Oh well, good enough. I didn’t have to struggle for the plot or anything. It’s imprinted on my brain forever. That made the paper come along much easier.

Then, it came time for the presentation. I ended up in about the middle of the pack, not the first and not the last to present. Everyone else wrote about characters who were human, some of them were even on movies based on real stories and most of them dealt with serious topics.

I wrote about...a cartoon fish. Leave it to me, I guess.

It cracks me up just thinking about it. It’s so absurd. And yet, the argument that the cartoon fish was a leader was undeniable.

It worked. We watched the clip and it took less effort to explain the plot leading up to the clip I showed, because most people had seen Finding Nemo before.

As I was walking back to my seat after the presentation, the professor said his two kids (who were pretty little at the time) love Finding Nemo.

I apologized for making him watch a minute and a half long clip of it again. He’s probably seen the movie as often as I had.

Also, Finding Nemo seems to get quoted by my co-workers on a regular basis. I do enjoy actually getting the reference once in a while.