The Academy Award-winning creators of the Toy Story films, A Bug's Life and Monsters, Inc. dive into a whole new world of computer-animated fun, fantasy and heartfelt emotion with their splashy new underwater adventure, Finding Nemo.

This latest feature from Pixar Animation Studios follows the comedic and eventful journeys of two fish - the overly cautious Marlin and his curious son Nemo - who become separated in the Great Barrier Reef. Buoyed by the companionship of Dory, a friendly-but- forgetful fish, Marlin embarks on a dangerous trek and finds himself the unlikely hero of an epic effort to rescue his son - who hatches a few daring plans of his own to return safely home.

Written and directed by Oscar nominee Andrew Stanton, who co-directed the 1998 Disney/Pixar hit, A Bug's Life and is credited as co-screenwriter on all four of Pixar's previous features, Finding Nemo sets a new "high water mark" for the art and technology of computer animation with its incredible underwater world populated with memorable characters. Based on an original story by Andrew Stanton, the screenplay for Finding Nemo was written by Stanton, Bob Peterson and David Reynolds.

Lending guidance to the overall project in his role as executive producer was John Lasseter, Pixar's executive vice president of creative, and the Academy Award-winning filmmaker who directed Toy Story, A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2, and served as executive producer on Monsters, Inc.

"This movie absolutely raises the bar for Pixar and for the art of computer animation," says Lasseter. "I'm so proud of Andrew for making a film that carries out his vision and gives us some of the most charming characters Pixar has ever created. The film is breathtakingly beautiful and filled with real drama, real emotion and depth, as well as great comedy. Being the father of five sons, this was definitely a story I could relate to. As filmmakers, we love to have the emotion be true and honest. And even though 'Nemo' is a complete fantasy, ifs based on things that are familiar to audiences. The father-son relationship, going to school for the first time - these are things everyone understands yet this film is about fish on a coral reef.

"Technically, we've pushed things beyond anything Pixar has done before," Lasseter continues. "Just animating fish was difficult, but our technical team has created an underwater environment that is graceful and beautiful. The real underwater world is so spectacular that it's already a fantasy world. Our challenge was to let the audience know that our ocean is caricatured. We wanted them to know that this wonderful world doesn't exist, but then using the amazing tools that we have in computer animation make it look totally believable. Our goal is always to make things believable, not realistic. By stylizing the design of things, adding more geometry and pushing the colors, we were able to create a natural and credible world for our characters."

From a visual standpoint, Finding Nemo is a stunning achievement that is both aesthetically appealing and groundbreaking. Production designer Ralph Eggleston (an Oscar- winner for his direction of the Pixar animated short "For the Birds" and production designer on the original Toy Story) set the look and style for the film. The film's dual directors of photography, Sharon Calahan and Jeremy Lasky, added to the look and excitement of "Nemo's" underwater setting with their innovative approach to lighting and layout. Calahan's lighting helped to give the film a modern 3-strip Technicolor quality and enhanced the underwater effect with soft backgrounds, vibrant colors and beautiful glows. Lasky's expert handling of the layout (camera movements, staging) added to the sense of being underwater and took full advantage of the film's dramatic possibilities.

Finding Nemo provides a spectacular showcase for all the members of Pixar's technical and creative teams. In order to tell the story convincingly, the technical team had to discover new and improved ways for animating underwater imagery in the computer. Extensive research and development was done to study water properties and new tools were created to provide the full range of possibilities required by the script. Supervising technical director Oren Jacob led an incredible effort to capture the look and feel of an organic coral reef and a vast ocean that would respond in a realistic way to the action of the characters. Early on, Jacob and Pixar's global technical wizards (supervised by Michael Fong) identified five key components that suggest an underwater environment - lighting (patterns of caustic lighting that dance on the ocean floor and fog beams that shine from the surface), particulate matter (the ever-present debris that appears in water), surge and swell (the constant movement that drives plant and aquatic life), murk (how the color of light filters out over distance and the distance appears dark), and reflections and refractions. Add in bubbles, ripples, drips and rings, and you have the makings of a very complex environment.

Jacob explains, "This film is far more complicated than Monsters, Inc. in that almost every shot involves some kind of simulation program or simulated movement. On average, there are more things going on per frame in this movie than we've done before by a pretty significant amount. There was more interdependency between the various departments than ever before and we often went back and forth to make sure the lighting and other components looked just right."


origins of nemo - a personal odyssey
The story of Finding Nemo was very personal for director/writer Andrew Stanton, derived from a series of events in his own life. A visit to Marine World in 1992 started him thinking about the amazing possibilities of capturing an undersea world in computer animation. This was three years before "Toy Story" made its debut, but Stanton was fascinated with the prospect of creating such a wondrous environment. Another piece of the puzzle came from Stanton's childhood memories of a fish tank in his family dentist's office. He recalls looking forward to going to the dentist just so he could look at the fish Stanton remembered thinking, "What a weird place for fish from the ocean to end up. Don't these fish miss their home? Would these fish try to escape and go back to the ocean?"

The final piece of the puzzle for Stanton was his own relationship with his son. He explains, "When my son was five, I remember taking him to the park. I had been working long hours and felt guilty about not spending enough time with him. As we were walking, I was experiencing all this pent up emotion and thinking 'I-miss-you, I-miss-you,' but I spent the whole walk going, 'Don't touch that. Don't do that. You're gonna fall in there.' And there was this third-party voice in my head saying 'You're completely wasting the entire moment that you've got with your son right now.' I became obsessed with this premise that fear can deny a good father from being one. With that revelation, all the pieces fell into place and we ended up with our story."

Pitching the story to his mentor and colleague John Lasseter was the next step in "Nemo's" evolution. Stanton prepared a roomful of elaborate visual aids and launched into a pitch to sell his story idea. After an hour. an exhausted Stanton asked Lasseter what he thought. "You had me at 'fish,"' Lasseter replied

Lasseter recalls, I remember when we were working on 'A Bug's Life' Andrew had this great little drawing that he did over his desk which showed two small fish swimming alongside a giant whale. And I always liked that. He told me it was something he was thinking about but I didn't hear anything more about it until the pitch. I've been a scuba diver since 1980 and I just love the underwater world. When he pitched this idea, I knew that it was gong to be amazing in our medium. We always pride ourselves at Pixar on matching the subject matter of our movies with the medium. I really did know when he said 'fish' and 'underwater' that this film was going to be great.

"Andrew is such a great storyteller," adds Lasseter. "He has an absolute fantastic devotion to making sure that the movie is not predictable. He's always added that to all of our films and I've learned a lot from him in that area. He believes that if something is getting too schmaltzy, he has to turn it on its ear. He has a way of getting sincerity through insincerity, but it's not so insincere that it doesn't have heart. He tends to be a little cynical but, in the end, there's so much heart underneath what he's doing."

Stanton concludes, "Telling a story where the protagonist is the father got me excited. I don't think I've ever seen an animated film from that perspective. It made me interested in wanting to write it because I knew I could tell that story. I also thought that the ocean was a great metaphor for life. It's the scariest, most intriguing place in the world because anything can be out there. And that can be a bad thing or a good thing. I loved playing with that issue and having a father whose own fears of life impede his parenting abilities. He has to overcome that issue just to become a better father. And having him in the middle of the ocean where he has to confront everything he never wanted to face in life seemed like a great opportunity for fun and still allowed us to delve into some slightly deeper issues."

He adds, "My dad gave me some good advice about parenting. He said, 'The tough choice you have is you can either be their parent or their friend. Pick one.' It's a lifelong dilemma and I love indulging in that truth with this film. I'm considered the most cynical of the group here at Pixar. I'm the first one to say when something is getting too corny or too sappy. Yet, I'd say I'm probably the biggest sucker romantic in the group, if the emotion is truthful. I just loved the idea of doing a father-son love story. They're in eternal conflict."

gone fishing: pixar's animators' inspiration
Pixar's expert team of animators have had their share of challenges in the past bringing life to toys, bugs and monsters, but their assignment on Finding Nemo proved to be the toughest yet. Visits to aquariums, diving stints in Monterey and Hawaii, study sessions in front of Pixar's well-stocked 25-gallon fish tank, and a series of in-house lectures from an ichthyologist all helped to get them into the swim of things.

The animators also looked at some of the Disney classics that involved underwater scenes - "Pinocchio," "The Sword in the Stone," "Bedknobs and Broomsticks," and "The Little Mermaid" - for inspiration. In the end, it was the naturalistic portrayal of animal life in "Bambi" that left the biggest impression.

Stanton explains, "We kept coming back to 'Bambi' because of the way the filmmakers adhered to the real nature of how these animals moved and what their motor skills were. They used that as the basis for getting as much expression, activity and appeal. We wanted our characters to work in that same way. We thought of it as 'Bambi' underwater. "

Supervising animator Dylan Brown, an eight-year Pixar veteran, and directing animators Mark Walsh and Alan Barillaro were responsible for guiding an animation team that fluctuated between 28 and 50. With a large cast of characters - ranging in size from the petite cleaner shrimp, Jacques, to the enormous blue whale - this group had their work cut out for them as they learned about fish locomotion and discovered how to create believable behaviors for characters without arms and legs.

Brown explains, "Each film has its own unique set of challenges and we always begin by trying to figure out what they are and how to solve them. With 'Nemo,' we had an entire cast of fish characters with no arms or legs. Since they didn't have the traditional limbs to allow strong silhouettes, we had to invent a whole new bag of tricks. In the beginning it was a bit daunting and frustrating. We began analyzing what was appealing in terms of posing fish. We put a lot of work into the face and getting the facial articulation just right. We didn't want
them to be just heads on sticks like in a Monty Python sketch. Their faces had to be integrated with the entire body language. Where a human character might just turn his head to look at something, a fish might turn his head just a little and the entire body would pivot along with it.

"Another big factor for us was timing," Brown continues. "With characters like Buzz, Woody or Sulley, you have an earth-based gravity. But fish underwater can travel three feet in a flash. You blink and the thing is gone. We were wondering how they did that and studied their movements on video. By slowing things down, we could figure it out. Our timing got very crisp as we learned how to get our fish characters from one place to another in the course of a frame or two. We always tried to incorporate naturalistic fish movements into the acting. By putting things like one-frame darting and transitioning from one place to another into our acting, the characters became very believable."

In the past, animators were always told to "ground their characters" and avoid letting them "float." With "Finding Nemo," they had to figure out the exact opposite - how to make them look like they were floating, but in water - not air.

Alan Barillaro observes, "It became fun and challenging to come up with a whole new range of how to communicate and gesture. You don't have gravity to deal with underwater, so we discovered things like when a character gestured, he would tend to drift a bit more. I found that a lot of the gestures humans make could be boiled down to eye and face movements. I would look at my own face in the mirror and imagine I had a tail on the back of it."

Mark Walsh recalls, "The first thing that Andrew did on the film was to sit with us in front of the fish tank and basically pitch the story to us. He explained that the magic of the world was going down to the perspective of a clown fish and imagining him going through an entire ocean and encountering sharks, turtles, jellyfish, etc. You imagine moving in closer and seeing this little fish and how hard he is trying."

To ensure that their characters would have the range of expressions and movements needed, the lead animators linked up with modelers and riggers from the character department and served as their "animation buddy." With direct input from the animators, the technical directors created new and improved tools and controls (known as avars) to enhance the overall character performance.

Brian Green, the Characters CG supervisor, explains, "This was the first time that Pixar has had a character department and it allowed us to serve the animators' needs better. The animation buddy might give us a drawing and say 'For acting purposes, I need it to look more like this.' We would go in and adjust it. This made for a very close relationship. We also tried to create automatic dynamic motion for some of the characters. Our goal was to try and automate everything we could - things like the movement of dangly bits on some characters - so the animator could concentrate on the performance."

Helping the animators get up to speed on fish behavior and locomotion
Technical triumphs - a new high water mark for computer animation
Finding nemo's look and style - production design & cinematography
The sounds of nemo - the music score and sound effects
Other animated films
Shrek     
Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas     
Treasure Planet