Finding Nemo is a 2003 Academy Award-winning computer-animated film. It was witten by Andrew Stanton, directed by Stanton and Lee Unkrich and produced by Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures and starred the voices of Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres and Alexander Gould. It tells the story of the clownfish Marlin (Brooks) and his search for his son Nemo (Gould) with a blue tang called Dory (DeGeneres). He learns in the process to be less protective of his son.
The film grossed over $864 million worldwide.[2] It is the best selling DVD of all time, with over 40 million copies sold as of 2006.[3]
Plot
When the clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) loses his wife, Coral (Elizabeth Perkins), and all but one of his unborn children to a barracuda, he promises that he will never let anything happen to the remaining egg, which he names Nemo.
Years later, Nemo (Alexander Gould) begins his first day at school and is frustrated and embarrassed by his overprotective father. Marlin has constantly warned Nemo about the dangers of the ocean. To show his father that there’s nothing to be afraid of, Nemo deliberately disobeys his father by swimming out into open water but, in the process, is captured by a scuba-diver. Marlin races after the diver’s boat but quickly loses it. He soon runs into a regal tang named Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), who unfortunately suffers from short-term memory loss. Seemingly abandoned, she decides to help Marlin search for his son. She helps him recover a diver’s mask that had fallen from the diver’s boat and finds he has been taken to Sydney.
Meanwhile Nemo is placed in a fish tank and soon finds out that he is to be the birthday present of a young girl named Darla (LuLu Ebeling), who is described as “a fish killer” (she inadvertently killed the last goldfish she was given by violently shaking the bag it was in). He soon discovers the other fish in the tank are all bent on escape, with Gill (Willem Dafoe) proposing an escape plan that involves Nemo jamming the filter in the tank. The first attempt fails and Nemo is nearly killed by the filter.
While Marlin and Dory are traveling with sea turtles on the East Australian Current, Marlin tells some of them about how he is looking for his son. This story travels among the sea creatures and eventually Nemo hears it. Nemo is inspired by this and attempts to jam the filter again. The tank begins to get dirty, which the fish believe will make the dentist take them out of the tank to clean it. However, he instead installs a laser filter which cleans the tank while the fish are sleeping.
Marlin and Dory arrive in Sydney and meet a brown pelican named Nigel (Geoffrey Rush) who agrees to take them to the dentist’s office. The dentist has put Nemo in a bag to give to his niece, but Nemo pretends to be dead so that the dentist will flush him down the toilet. Marlin, Dory and Nigel arrive at the office and, seeing Nemo, believe he is truly dead. After they are thrown out the window, Gill helps Nemo escape down the dentist’s sink to the ocean.
Marlin thanks Dory and heads home on his own. Dory then bumps into Nemo and she is able to reunite them. Moments later, Dory is caught in a fishing net. Nemo has a plan to save Dory by telling the fish caught in the net to swim down, but Marlin is reluctant to let him go for fear that he will lose him again. Marlin, however, realizes he must let him go and they are able to save Dory. After the rescue, Marlin apologizes to his son for being overprotective.
In the epilogue, Nemo leaves for school, with Marlin telling him to “go have an adventure” and the fish in the dentist’s tank are able to escape; however, they are still in their plastic bags. In the last line of the movie, one of the fish asks “now what?”. As the credits scroll, the dentist’s fish are shown swimming freely, having somehow escaped their bags. The viewers also see Monsters, Inc.’s Mike Wazowski swimming by near the end.
Production
The movie was dedicated to Glenn McQueen, a Pixar animator who died of melanoma in October 2002, seven months before the film was released.
Pre-production of the film took place in early 1997. Film production took place according to IMDb in January 2000 with a crew of 180.
Danny Elfman was asked by executive producer John Lasseter to compose the film score, but despite promotional posters still saying “music by DANNY ELFMAN”, Elfman dropped out. After that, someone, possibly co-writer/director Andrew Stanton, asked Hans Zimmer to compose the score. However, Zimmer dropped out, too, as he was working on Shark Tale.
Robin Williams, who worked for Eisner and Disney before in Aladdin and had a bitter fall out with him and The Walt Disney Company after going back on the deal they had (Robin Williams and the Disney studio), has hinted in an interview that he refused a role in this film, because it would mean working for Michael Eisner again. He will not state which role he refused .
In an interview, Megan Mullally revealed that she was originally doing a voice in the film. According to Mullally, the producers were quite disappointed when they learned that the voice Mullally used for Karen Walker 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.
Reception
Finding Nemo set a record as the highest grossing opening weekend for an animated feature, making $70 million (surpassed a year later in 2004 by Shrek 2). It went on to gross more than $864.6 million worldwide, in the process becoming Pixar’s most commercially successful film to date. It received a 98% fresh rating at RottenTomatoes.com.[5] The film’s prominent use of clownfish prompted mass purchase of the animals for children’s pets in the United States, even though the movie portrayed the use of fish as pets negatively and that saltwater aquariums are notably tricky and expensive to maintain.[6] As of 2004, in Vanuatu, clownfish were being caught on a large scale for sale as pets, motivated by the demand.[7]
At the same time, the film had a central theme that “all drains lead back to the ocean” (Nemo escapes from the aquarium by going down a sink drain, ending up in the sea.) Since water typically undergoes treatment before leading to the ocean, the JWC Environmental company quipped that a more realistic title for the movie might be Grinding Nemo.[8] However, in Sydney, much of the sewer system does pass directly to outfall pipes deep offshore, without a high level of treatment (although pumping and some filtering occurs.)[9] Additionally, according to the DVD, there was a cut sequence with Nemo going through a treatment plant’s mechanisms before ending up in the ocean pipes, and even in the final product, logos for “Sydney Water Treatment” are featured prominently along the path to the ocean, implying that Nemo did pass through some water treatment.
Tourism in Australia strongly increased during the summer and autumn of 2003, with many tourists wanting to swim off the coast of Eastern Australia to “find Nemo.”[citation needed] The Australian Tourism Commission (ATC) launched several marketing campaigns in China and the USA in order to improve tourism in Australia many of them using Finding Nemo movie clips. [2][10] Queensland, Australia also used Finding Nemo to draw tourists to promote its state for vacationers.[11]
Legal challenges
In late 2003, the French children’s book author Franck Le Calvez claimed that Finding Nemo’s story and characters were stolen from his book Pierrot Le Poisson-Clown (Pierrot the Clownfish). The idea of Pierrot was protected in 1995 and the book was released in France in November 2002.[12] Franck Le Calvez and his lawyer, Pascal Kamina, demanded from Disney a share of the profits from merchandising articles sold in France. In March 2004, Le Calvez and Kamina lost the lawsuit.[13] Two years later, in February 2005, a New Jersey dentist named Dennis G. Sternberg filed suit against Disney/Pixar, alleging they had plagiarised his concept for a film entitled Peanut Butter the Jelly Fish, which he had discussed with Andrew Stanton in the 1990s.[14] Sternberg soon dropped the lawsuit, saying he could not afford to lose.
Awards
Finding Nemo won the Academy Award and Saturn Award for Best Animated Film. It also won the award for best Animated Film at the Kansas City Film Critics Circle Awards, the Las Vegas Film Critics Society Awards, the National Board of Review Awards, the Online Film Critics Society Awards and the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards.[15]
The film received many awards, including:
- Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards for Favorite Movie and Favorite Voice from an Animated Movie, Ellen Degeneres.
Finding Nemo was also nominated for:
- Two Chicago Film Critics Association Awards for Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress, Ellen DeGeneres
- A Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy
- Two MTV Movie Awards
Finding Nemo - The Musical
The stage musical Tarzan Rocks! occupied the Theater in the Wild at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida from 1999 to 2006. When, in January 2006, it closed, it was rumored that a musical adaptation of Finding Nemo would replace it.[16] This was confirmed in April 2006, when Disney announced that the adaptation, with new songs written by Tony Award-winning Avenue Q composer Robert Lopez and his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, would “combine puppets, dancers, acrobats and animated backdrops” and open in late 2006.[17] Tony Award-winning director Peter Brosius signed on to direct the show, with Michael Curry, who designed puppets for Disney’s successful stage version of The Lion King, serving as leading puppet and production designer.
Anderson-Lopez said that the couple agreed to write the adaptation of “one of their favorite movies of all time” after considering “The idea of people coming in [to see the musical] at 4, 5 or 6 and saying, ‘I want to do that’….So we want to take it as seriously as we would a Broadway show.”[18] To condense the feature-length film to thirty minutes, she said she and Lopez focused on a single theme from the movie, the idea that “The world’s dangerous and beautiful.”[18]
The half-hour show (which is performed five times daily) went into previews at the Theater in the Wild on November 5, 2006, and opened on January 24, 2007. Several musical numbers took direct inspiration from lines in the film, including “(In The) Big Blue World,” “Fish Are Friends, Not Food,” “Just Keep Swimming,” and “Go With the Flow.” In January 2007, a New York studio recording of the show was released on iTunes, with Lopez and Anderson-Lopez providing the voices for Marlin and Dory, respectively. Avenue Q star Stephanie D’Abruzzo also appeared on the recording, as Sheldon/Deb.
It is unknown whether the show will be expanded and transfer to Broadway, though Walt Disney Parks & Resorts executive Ann Hamburger has said that “she would love for that to happen.”[18] Nemo is notable for being the first non-musical animated film to which Disney has added songs to produce a stage musical.
