Finding Nemo
Plot
Marlin, an apprehensive
Ocellaris clownfish who lives in the
Great Barrier Reef, is very controlling of his only child, Nemo, after his wife, Coral, and the rest of their offspring are killed by a
barracuda. Nemo has an abnormally small right fin, his "lucky fin", which causes Marlin to worry over his swimming ability. On his first day of school, Nemo boldly ventures away from the reef and touches the bottom of a boat. An argument ensues between father and son; Marlin insisting that Nemo can't possibly do much because of his fin. To his father's horror, Nemo is captured by a
scuba diver and driven away in the boat.
In search of help, Marlin meets Dory, a naïve, but optimistic
blue tang fish with
short-term memory loss. While meeting would-be vegetarian sharks, Bruce, Anchor and Chum, Marlin discovers a diver's mask that was dropped from the boat. During a hazardous struggle with an
angler fish into the
deep sea, Dory is able to read an address written on the mask as
Sydney, Australia. After receiving directions from a large school of fish,
Marlin and
Dory set out to find Sydney. They encounter dangerous jellyfish, and later befriend a
surf cultured turtle named Crush while "riding" the
East Australian Current. Marlin reluctantly shares the details of his journey with a group of young turtles, and eventually, his story reaches Sydney through
word of mouth.
Meanwhile,
Nemo's captor, a dentist, drops him into a fish tank in his office on
Sydney Harbour, and Nemo meets its residents, a group of fish called the "Tank Gang". The gang is led by a crafty and ambitious
moorish idol fish named
Gill. The fish are frightened to learn that the dentist plans to give Nemo to his niece, Darla, who has previously killed a pet fish in a bag of water by shaking it. Gil gives Nemo a role in his most recent escape plan, which involves jamming the tank's
filter, and forcing the dentist to remove the fish from the tank while he cleans it manually. Nemo attempts to jam the filter using a rock, and his first attempt fails and nearly kills him, but he later succeeds after Nigel the pelican visits with news of Marlin's journey. The plan, however, is thwarted when the dentist installs a more advanced filter and has no need to take the fish out of the tank.
After several adventures, like getting swallowed by a
whale and blown out of the blowhole, Marlin and Dory arrive in Sydney and are met by Nigel, who recognizes and takes them to the dentist's office, but find the dentist is already getting ready to give Nemo to Darla. Nemo acts dead as to force him to be flushed down the drain and eventually into the sea, but this also causes Marlin to believe him to be dead. After Nigel's presence in the office causes a small pandemonium, Gill helps Nemo to escape down a drain.
Despite the fact that Dory claims to have better memory when around him, Marlin leaves for home. Dory becomes confused but encounters Nemo; though temporarily confused due to her memories, she eventually remembers Marlin's goal, and helps Nemo back to his father. Marlin is relieved to see that his son is alright, but moments later, Dory is caught, along with a school of
grouper, in a fishing net. Making his father realize that he must trust him, Nemo swims to help the fish, including Dory, escape using a trick taught to him by Gill and the other aquarium fish. The three return back home, with Marlin less protective of Nemo now aware of his son's abilities. Nemo hugs his father, saying that he loves him and Marlin says that he does, too. Nemo and his class, including Squirt, a young sea turtle that Marlin and Dory met on their journey, as an exchange student, head off to school. An epilogue is shown that the aquarium's filter is broken and the tank gang's escape plan works and they are cheering in the ocean still in their bags. The epilogue ends with Bloat saying "Now what?".
Voice cast
- Albert Brooks as Marlin, a clownfish, Nemo's overprotective father, and the main protagonist of the film.
- Ellen DeGeneres as Dory, a regal tang with short-term memory loss, and the tritagonist of the film.
- Alexander Gould as Nemo, a juvenile clownfish, the title character, Marlin's son, and the deuteragonist of the film.
- Willem Dafoe as Gill, a moorish idol and the leader of the aquarium fish.
- Brad Garrett as Bloat, a puffer fish and an aquarium member.
- Allison Janney as Peach, a starfish, an aquarium member and often the group's spotter.
- Austin Pendleton as Gurgle, a royal gramma, an aquarium member who has molysmophobia.
- Stephen Root as Bubbles, a yellow tang, an aquarium member who is a bubble-maniac.
- Vicki Lewis as Deb, a four-striped damselfish, an aquarium member who calls her own reflection -- who she thinks is her sister -- "Flo".
- Joe Ranft as Jacques, a pacific cleaner shrimp, an aquarium member and the group's cleanser.
- Geoffrey Rush as Nigel, a brown pelican who befriends the aquarium group.
- Andrew Stanton as Crush, an extreme loggerhead sea turtle who advises Marlin on raising children.
- Elizabeth Perkins as Coral, a clownfish and Marlin's wife who got killed by a barracuda along with almost all of her offspring she gave birth to.
- Nicholas Bird as Squirt, a juvenile sea turtle and Crush's son.
- Bob Peterson as Mr. Ray, an Spotted eagle ray and the reef school's teacher.
- Barry Humphries as Bruce, a great white shark who is the head of an abstinence group of sharks who don't eat fish.
- Eric Bana as Anchor, a hammerhead shark in Bruce's abstinence group.
- Bruce Spence as Chum, a mako shark in Bruce's abstinence group.
- Jordy Ranft as Tad, a butterflyfish.
- Erica Beck as Pearl, a dumbo octopus.
- Erik Per Sullivan as Sheldon, a seahorse.
- John Ratzenberger as the school of moonfish.
- Bill Hunter as Dr. Philip Sherman, the dentist who caught Nemo.The secondary antagonist of the film.
- Lulu Ebeling as Darla Sherman, Dr. Sherman's niece and the main antagonist of the film.
- Robbie Williams sings Beyond the Sea.
Production
"It was so arresting. I had no idea what kind of fish they were, but I couldn't take my eyes off them. And as an entertainer, the fact that they were called clownfish—it was perfect. There's almost nothing more appealing than these little fish that want to play peekaboo with you."[4]
Pre-production of the film took place in early 1997. Film production began, according to
IMDb, in January 2000 with a crew of 180.
In an interview,
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.
[5]The movie was dedicated to
Glenn McQueen, a Pixar animator who died of
melanoma in October 2002, seven months before the film was released.
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 was the second highest grossing movie of 2003, behind
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
[6]. It is also highly critically acclaimed, as it currently holds a 98% fresh rating at
Rotten Tomatoes with 100% by top critics, an average of 89% on Metacritic and four stars from Empire.
[7] Roger Ebert gave it four stars, saying "one of those rare movies where I wanted to sit in the front row and let the images wash out to the edges of my field of vision."
The film's prominent use of clownfish prompted mass purchase of the animal as 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.
[8] As of 2003
[update], in
Vanuatu, clownfish were being caught on a large scale for sale as pets, motivated by the demand.
[9]At the same time, the film had a quote 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.
[10] 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 occur.)
[11] 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. However, 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.
Behind the scenes
The character, Bruce, shares his name with the mechanical sharks built for the 1975 production of
Jaws, collectively nicknamed "Bruce" by the production team after
Steven Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce Ramer.
[15]Awards
The film received many awards, including:
Finding Nemo was also nominated for:
In June 2008 the
American Film Institute revealed its "Ten top Ten", the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres, after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community.
Finding Nemo was acknowledged as the 10th best film in the animation genre.
[17][18] It was the most recently released film among all ten lists, and one of only three movies made after the year 2000, the others being
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and
Shrek.
References in Media
In an episode of the television show
Lost,
Finding Nemo is referenced when Shannon says while in France she knew a boy who would watch a computer animated movie about fish which ended in the song
"Beyond the Sea." Music
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.
[19] 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.
[20] 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."
[21] 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."
[21]The forty-minute show (which is performed five times daily) opened on January 2, 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.
Nemo was the first non-musical animated film to which Disney added songs to produce a stage musical. In 2009
Finding Nemo - The Musical was honored with a Thea award for Best Live Show from the
Themed Entertainment Association.
