In the myth, Icarus dies and in the film, Nemo gets kidnapped. Both Icarus and Nemo ignored their father's warnings and decided to disobey which led to two losses. In the movie, Nemo's dad was the one who told Nemo not to swim off to the sea. In the Icarus myth, the authority figure would be his father, Daedalus, who told him to not fly too close to the sun because he knew what would happen if he did. They both contain an authority figure that warns the young characters about certain dangers, an act of willing disobedience, and lastly a loss. In both the myth and the movie, they contain three elements that make them a parallel. As the movie progresses we find out the Nemo was taken captive in a fish tank and soon to be given as a gift to a reckless child. As Nemo is coming back towards the reef, a scuba diver comes from behind him, puts him in a bag, and swims off back to the boat. Soon after, as his father isn't looking, Nemo swims off to the open sea towards a boat. Nemo takes what his father says to heart and makes him furious. His dad starts yelling at him saying that he isn't ready to be going out on his own. Nemo's dad quickly steps in before Nemo could swim out. One day, during a class trip, Nemo and his friends go off on their own towards the end of the reef and play a small, childish game of who could swim the farthest to the open sea. In the movie Finding Nemo, Nemo lives with his overprotective father who like any parent, only wants what's best for him and wants to keep him safe. Sure enough, his wings melted, and Icarus fell into the sea and drowned. Before they set off, Daedalus warned Icarus to "Above all, don't fly too high! Don't fly too close to the sun!" Once they set off, Icarus' enthusiasm got the best of him and he tried to go higher than the sun. Icarus at first was skeptical about his father's invention and didn't want to leave, but as fathers do, he gave him strong words of encouragement. Day and night, Daedalus worked on his greatest invention that would get them out of Crete, which turned out to be two pairs of wings made out of feathers and wax. When he found out about this, Daedalus wanted to flee the island with his son, Icarus, but King Minos didn't permit this and kept them as royal prisoners. One day Minos ordered Daedalus, an ingenious inventor, to build him a maze and he agreed only to find out that the labyrinth contained a Minotaur that fed on men and women. And as William Empson pointed out about the myth of Oedipus, whatever Oedipus’ problem was, it wasn’t an ‘Oedipus complex’ in the Freudian sense of that phrase, because the mythical Oedipus was unaware that he had married his own mother (rather than being attracted to her in full knowledge of who she was).The myth of Icarus takes place on the island of Crete where the unruly King Minos is in charge. Similarly, Narcissus, in another famous Greek myth, actually shunned other people before he fell in love with his own reflection, and yet we still talk of someone who is obsessed with their own importance and appearance as being narcissistic. (Or, as the Bible bluntly puts it, the love of money is the root of all evil.) The moral of King Midas, of course, was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and riches can bring. However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. We describe a challenging undertaking as a Herculean task, and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as having the Midas touch. So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel, or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box. The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories, are part of our everyday speech.
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