Disney Rewind: Finding Nemo 20th Anniversary
In 1997, Pixar animator and writer Andrew Stanton came up with the idea of an animated feature about an overprotective clownfish searching the vast ocean for his son.
Despite some initial worry, this film would become not just another success but a sensation. But that’s only half of the story.
When Andrew was a child, he enjoyed going to the dentist to see the aquarium in the waiting room. He always imagined that the fish wanted to escape back to the ocean.
When he grew up, Andrew took his family to Marin World and thought that the underwater world would be perfect in computer animation. But what really sparked the idea was a walk he took with his son while working on A Bug’s Life.
While Andrew wanted to spend time with his son, he was spoiling it because he was too overprotective. And that’s what gave him the idea of a father-son story about fish.
The choice of clownfish made sense because they rarely come out of their anemone, so it was a perfect story for a clownfish to leave home and onto the big ocean to save his son.
Once the idea was pitched to John Lasseter, he said the first thing to do was research. So, Andrew and a few of the staff went scuba diving to various oceans.
At first, it seemed hard to create a believable underwater world, but they managed to create a world that looked like a caricatured version of underwater.
When it came to animating the fish characters, the animators had to study all there is to know about undersea creatures. But they also kept in mind that they had to act and talk in order to tell the story.
When the film was nearing, they had an early audience screening that proved to be the most successful screening in the history of the studio. But Andrew didn’t want to get his hopes up that the film would be a success.
After four in a half years of work, Finding Nemo was released to universal acclaim and would be the biggest hit for Pixar at the time. The film would go on to win Pixar’s first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and is today considered one of the most excellent animated films produced.
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