Finding Nemo

Finding Nemo is Pixar's fifth feature film. It was originally released in theatres on May 30, 2003 and re-released in 3D on September 14, 2012, along with the Toy Story Toon short Partysaurus Rex. The sequel, Finding Dory, was released on June 17, 2016.

Story
The story of Finding Nemo centers on a widowed clownfish named Marlin and a blue tang fish named Dory traveling across the ocean to Sydney to find Marlin's lost son, Nemo.

Plot
A clownfish couple Marlin and Coral, are about to be the parents of 400 unborn children. However, a marauding barracuda attacks their home. Marlin survives but the Barracuda eats Coral and 399 of her eggs. However, Marlin sees that the Barracuda missed one egg and comes to its aid. He promises that he will never let anything happen to the remaining egg, which he names Nemo because that was one of Coral's favorite names.

Years later, Nemo born with a deformed fin due to damage the egg took during the barracuda attack begins his first day at school and is eager to get going. However, his overprotective father Marlin is nervous about letting his son go to school. After Marlin sends Nemo off to class with his teacher Mr. Ray the stingray, he goes to check on Nemo and catches him almost swim out into open water. The two of them argue in front of Nemo's classmates and Nemo, grumpy with his father, swims away into the open water. Once there, he is captured by a diver, who immediately leaves on a speedboat.

Marlin chases after the speedboat but soon loses it. Asking for directions, he meets Dory, a blue tang who suffers from short-term memory loss. She helps him find out that Nemo has been taken to Sydney, and the two of them travel there on the East Australian Current. During their time together, Dory teaches Marlin to be more carefree.

Meanwhile, Nemo is placed in a fish tank in a dentist's office. He discovers that he is to be the present of the dentist's niece Darla, a serial fish killer according to the other fish in the tank as she has no idea on how to properly care for fish leading to them quickly dying under her care. Gill, one of the fish in the tank, proposes an escape plan involving Nemo jamming the filter in the tanks, which Nemo attempts, but initially fails at.

Meanwhile, Marlin and Dory meet fish-friendly sharks, who had sworn never to eat a fellow fish, and they adopt Marlin and Dory as buddies. Later, Marlin notices the main clue as to Nemo's whereabouts is a mask. But when he and Dory fight over how to read it, it hits her nose, causing a small nosebleed, which Bruce, a shark, accidentally sniffs, causing him to go wild. His shark friends tried to restrain him as the two fish trying to escape. But an accidental torpedo launch causes every depth charge nearby to explode, though no one gets killed.

Later on, while Marlin and Dory are sleeping, the sub they're on is about to tumble down into the depths, as well as the mask. The two fish follow it down, as the darkness overtakes them. Dory's forgetfulness causes her to think Marlin is her conscience before they see a light, but it turns out to be a lure from anglerfish. Marlin keeps it busy while Dory tries to read the mask, giving her information which directs them to someplace called Sydney.

While they were on their mission to find Nemo, Marlin and Dory stop to have a small talk. Marlin explains to her that he could take it from here by himself he thinks Dory is so annoying when she kept talking to herself and saying 'P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney' over and over again. When Marlin says he doesn't want Dory with him, Dory starts crying and says Marlin doesn't like her. Marlin says that he does, but to make things worse, he says it's a complicated emotion.

A school of fish tells Marlin and Dory to take the Eastern Australian Current to Sydney but advises Dory to go through the trench, but she forgets. Marlin's paranoia of the trench has them swim above it, only to find a school of jellyfish. Luckily, the tops of the jellyfish don't sting, so they treated it like a game. But Dory fails to get out, having been stung repeatedly. Marlin manages to get her out before passing out. He later awakes with a legion of sea turtles on the East Australian Current. When he catches Dory still dead, he feels bad for leading her over instead of through the trench; however, she makes a full recovery also. After getting near their destination, they accidentally get swallowed by a whale, who was chasing krill. When Marlin fails to break out, once again, Dory swims down to him and says the same eight words she said when she first met Marlin. While refusing that rudely but sadly, Marlin tells his promise to Nemo on Dory. She explains that Marlin can never let anything happen to Nemo. This being what should've happened to Marlin to protect his son, he sighs sadly. While inside, Dory tries to talk to him the whale and the whale tells them to let go as he sprouts them out. The tale travels faster than Marlin by way of gossip among the sea creatures and eventually, Nemo hears it from Nigel, a brown pelican who occasionally comes to visit the fish in the tank. Upon hearing all of his Dad's adventures, Nemo is inspired to attempt to jam the filter again. This time he is successful. The tank begins to get really really dirty. At this point in Gill's plan, the dentist would take the fish out of the tank and into small plastic bags. The fish would then roll out the window, onto an awning, across the street, and into the conveniently situated harbor. However, the dentist installs a laser filter which cleans the tank while the fish are sleeping.

Marlin and Dory are then swallowed by Gerald until Nigel makes Gerald cough them up. The two fish meet Nigel who agrees to take them to the dentist's office. While they are en route, the dentist puts Nemo in a bag to give to his niece, but Nemo gets the idea to pretend to be dead so that the dentist will flush him down the potty, which will take Nemo to the ocean. Marlin, Dory, and Nigel arrive at the office and are horrified to see Nemo dead. Gill saves Nemo from getting thrown in the trash can instead of the potty and helps Nemo escape the dentist's sink.

Marlin, depressed, thinking that he broke his promise, determines to go home, meanwhile, Dory becomes forgetful again until she meets Nemo. When she reads Sydney on a water tube, her entire memory suddenly returns and helps Nemo finds Marlin by forcing a crab to tell where Marlin went. With is information, Marlin and Nemo are reunited, but moments later they find that Dory is caught in a fishing net. Nemo has a plan to save her, but Marlin is reluctant to let him go for fear that he will lose him again. Marlin realizes he must let him go, and Nemo's plan succeeds.

After their adventure, Marlin is now not nearly overprotective of his son knowing he can look after himself. Dory also spends a lot of time with the two, and she accompanies Marlin as he takes Nemo to school.

As an epilogue, the fish in the dentist's fish tank is shown to succeed after a fashion in their last escape attempt after sabotaging the filter. However, they are still in their plastic bags, floating in the water.

Voice Cast

 * Alexander Gould as Nemo
 * Albert Brooks as Marlin
 * Ellen DeGeneres as Dory
 * Elizabeth Perkins as Coral
 * Willem Dafoe as Gill
 * Brad Garrett as Bloat
 * Austin Pendleton as Gurgle
 * Allison Janney as Peach
 * Bill Hunter as P. Sherman
 * LuLu Ebeling as Darla
 * Vicki Lewis as Deb
 * Joe Ranft as Jacques
 * Stephen Root as Bubbles
 * Barry Humphries as Bruce
 * Eric Bana as Anchor
 * Bruce Spence as Chum
 * John Ratzenberger as Moonfish
 * Andrew Stanton as Crush and the Seagulls
 * Nicholas Bird as Squirt
 * Geoffrey Rush as Nigel
 * Rove McManus as Crab
 * Bob Peterson as Mr. Ray
 * Erik Per Sullivan as Sheldon
 * Jordy Ranft as Tad
 * Erica Beck as Pearl
 * Katherine Ringgold as Kathy

Production
The inspiration for Nemo was made up of multiple experiences. The idea goes back to when director Andrew Stanton was a child when he loved going to the dentist to see the fish tank, assuming that the fish were from the ocean and wanted to go home. In 1992, shortly after his son was born, he and his family took a trip to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom (which was called Marine World at the time). There he saw the shark tube and various exhibits he felt that the underwater world could be done beautifully in computer animation. Later, in 1997 he took his son for a walk in the park but found that he was over protecting him constantly and lost an opportunity to have any "father-son experiences" on that day.

Pre-production of the film took place in early 1997. The artists took scuba diving lessons so they could go and study the coral reef. The idea for the initiation sequence came from a story conference between Andrew Stanton and Bob Peterson while driving to record the actors. Ellen DeGeneres was cast after Stanton was watching The Ellen DeGeneres Show with his wife and seeing Ellen "change the subject five times before finishing one sentence" as Stanton recalled. There was a pelican character known as Gerald (who in the final film ends up swallowing and choking on Marlin and Dory) who was originally a friend of Nigel. They were going to play against each other as Nigel being neat fastidious while Gerald being scruffy and sloppy. However, the filmmakers could not find an appropriate scene for them that didn't slow the pace of the picture down, so Gerald's character was minimized.

The water and lighting effects for Finding Nemo were far more complex than any other project previously attempted by Pixar. Water is particularly difficult to animate since its motions are extremely complex and splashes can have thousands of individual drops. Pixar relied heavily on particle simulation techniques developed during the production of Monsters, Inc. for these shots, which were later refined to be rendered as water and bubbles instead of fur, clothing, or snow. Pixar also reused some of the "auto-rusting" functions from the Pipe-o-Matic program used for the factory scenes in Monsters, Inc. to create rust on the inside of the submarine. Although the presence of human characters in the film was minimal, there is a significant improvement in photorealism over the human characters from Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story 2. The tentacles of the anemone were actually constructed with Sulley's fur, which was altered to be thicker and affected by buoyancy instead of gravity.

The complexities of CGI water proved challenging for the lighting department as well since they were tasked with convincingly creating the dancing "caustic lights" on the ocean floor that results from wave motion at the surface. The lighting department also experimented with refraction, as seen with multiple shots of the "Tank Gang."

Megan Mullally revealed that she was originally doing a voice in the film. According to Mullally, the producers were quite disappointed to learn that the voice of her character Karen Walker on the television show Will & Grace wasn't her natural speaking voice. The producers hired her anyway, and then strongly encouraged her to use her Karen Walker voice for the role. When Mullally refused, she was fired.

Glenn McQueen, a supervising animator who worked on the movie, died from skin cancer in October 2002, and thus the film is dedicated to him.