Just Keep Swimming: The Production of Finding Nemo.

By: Josh Stephen.


Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The History and Production of Pixar Classics.

Today, we're going to talk about the production of Finding Nemo. But before we dive straight into this, I'll give you some background information about the film in case you've never seen it before.

Finding Nemo came to theaters in 2003, and is the fifth movie in PIXAR's catalogue. The movie is about two orange clownfish, a father, and a son, who get separated. The father, Marlin, embarks on an epic journey throughout the ocean to find his son, Nemo, with the help of a blue tang named Dory, played by Ellen DeGeneres, while Nemo learns how to overcome his fears without his father.

The main challenges that the team faced was learning how to actually adapt the visuals of undersea life into their animation software, Renderman, and better adapting the full screenplay that writer/director Andrew Stanton had written.

To adapt the visuals, the team had to lean less into the photorealism that they originally wanted to go for with this film, and lean more into a slight cartoon-like feeling for the characters, but kept the mostly photorealistic backdrops. They also decided to try simulate water within Renderman as little as possible, relying heavily on the colorful backgrounds of the sea and fish tank areas to push the illusion of these characters being underwater.

You can view some of the concept art for the characters and backgrounds on the official Pixar website, along with some videos that dive a little more in-depth about those aspects of the production, as well as reading this article from Fandango to learn more.

But, that's all I have to say for today.

On the next post, I'll be talking about the next movie to come out after this one, The Incredibles.

So, until next time, just keep swimming.

Photo by Dreamstime user Pindiyath100.

Comments

  1. Sabrina HumpertDecember 4, 2023 at 8:19 AM

    I love Finding Nemo! It was so interesting learning about the process in creating the underwater experience on screen! Keep up the good work!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kevin EmanDecember 6, 2023 at 3:52 PM

    Definitely one of my top animated movies ever! I can imagine how difficult it is to try and make an underwater animated film with it already underwater. I figured it would be important to include the background elements of the ocean. Pretty cool!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Timothy WhiteDecember 16, 2023 at 3:27 PM

    I hadn't heard this story before. Even with these limitations, they were still able to make one of the best animated movies of all time.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Jillian DrummondDecember 19, 2023 at 4:45 PM

    Okay now how do we feel about Finding Dory?

    ReplyDelete

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