| Finding Nemo | |
|---|---|
Original theatrical poster |
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| Directed by | Andrew Stanton Co-Director: Lee Unkrich |
| Produced by | Graham Walters Executive Producer: John Lasseter Associate Producer: Jinko Gotoh |
| Written by | Story: Andrew Stanton Screenplay: Andrew Stanton Bob Peterson David Reynolds |
| Starring | Albert Brooks Ellen DeGeneres Alexander Gould Willem Dafoe Brad Garrett Joe Ranft Allison Janney Austin Pendleton Stephen Root Geoffrey Rush Nicolas Bird Erica Beck LuLu Ebeling Barry Humphries |
| Music by | Thomas Newman Robbie Williams (end credits song, "Beyond the Sea") Antonio Carlos Jobim Bob Bain Bernard Herrmann |
| Cinematography | Sharon Calahan Jeremy Lasky |
| Editing by | David Ian Salter |
| Distributed by | Walt Disney Pictures |
| Release date(s) | May 30, 2003 |
| Running time | 100 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $94 million[1] |
| Gross revenue | United States: $339,714,978 Worldwide: $864,625,978 DVD Sales: over 40 million copies |
Finding Nemo is a 2003 computer-animated family film. It was written by Andrew Stanton, directed by Stanton and Lee Unkrich and produced by Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures. It tells the story of the overly protective clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks), who along with a regal tang called Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), searches for his son Nemo (Alexander Gould). Along the way he learns to take risks and that his son is capable of taking care of himself.
The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. It was a financial blockbuster as it grossed over $864 million worldwide.[1] It is the best-selling DVD of all time, with over 40 million copies sold as of 2006.[2] In 2008, the American Film Institute named it the 10th greatest American Animated film ever made during their 10 Top 10. [3]
This film was rated G by the MPAA.
Contents |
Shortly after the Ocellaris clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) and his wife Coral (Elizabeth Perkins), move in to a new home, Coral is killed by a barracuda along with all of their eggs, except for one. Marlin finds that egg and promises it he will never leave it, naming it Nemo as suggested by Coral. The egg has been damaged in the attack.
Some time later, Nemo (Alexander Gould) begins his first day at school, but is frustrated and embarrassed by his overprotective father. Marlin has constantly warned Nemo about the dangers of the ocean because he himself fears them, and also because one of Nemo's fins is much smaller than the other due to the damage to his egg. Disobeying his father in order to show him that these fears are unfounded, Nemo deliberately swims out to open water; in the process, he is captured by a scuba diver. Marlin races after the diver's boat but quickly loses it. As he desperately searches for help, he bumps into Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), a regal tang who suffers from short-term memory loss, but is nonetheless relentlessly optimistic in contrast to Marlin. The pair soon encounter three dieting sharks, Bruce, Anchor and Chum (Barry Humphries, Eric Bana and Bruce Spence respectively), who are members of "Fish Eaters Anonymous," an organization modeled after AA.
Marlin and Dory inadvertently spark Bruce into a feeding frenzy and are forced to flee into a deep trench, only to be nearly eaten by an angler fish. Here they find a scuba mask dropped by the diver and discover that Nemo has been taken to Sydney, Australia, and Dory surprises herself by being able to remember the address written on it. A passing school of fish (one of whom is voiced by John Ratzenberger) gives them directions to get there via the East Australian Current, and also advises them to go through the trench that leads to it. However, Marlin disregards this warning and leads Dory over the trench, where she is stung nearly to death by a mass of jellyfish.
Meanwhile, Nemo is placed in a fishtank in a dentist's office. The dentist, who captured him earlier, plans to give Nemo to his niece Darla (Lulu Ebeling) as a birthday present; the other fish in the tank fear her greatly, knowing her tendency to handle fish so roughly that they die. Their leader, Gill (Willem Dafoe), a Moorish Idol, has been plotting a mass escape and calls on Nemo to jam the tank's water filter. The first attempt fails, nearly costing Nemo his life, and Gill apologizes for endangering him for personal gain.
Marlin and Dory are found by a group of sea turtles who are riding the East Australian Current, and Dory makes a full recovery. As he befriends the turtle Crush and his son Squirt, Marlin tells some of the sea turtles about his reason for venturing so far from home. His story travels among the sea creatures, eventually reaching Nemo via a friendly Brown Pelican named Nigel (Geoffrey Rush). Nemo is inspired by this account and makes a second attempt on his own to jam the filter, this time meeting with success. The tank begins to get dirty, and the fish hope that the dentist will take them out so he can clean it; once they are in individual plastic bags, they can roll out the window and into the harbor. However, while they are sleeping, he installs a high-tech filter to keep the tank clean automatically, foiling their plan.
Marlin and Dory are swallowed by a blue whale, which delivers them safely to Sydney. Confronted by a pelican and a flock of hungry seagulls in the harbor, they are rescued by Nigel, who takes them to the office as the dentist removes Nemo from the tank and puts him in a bag. When Darla arrives, Nemo pretends to be dead, hoping that he will be flushed down the toilet and thus be able to reach the ocean. Marlin and Dory are shocked to see Nemo belly-up and believe he is truly dead. After they and Nigel are thrown out the window, Gill helps Nemo escape down the drain of the dentist's sink to the ocean.
Deeply depressed in the belief that his rescue attempt amounted to nothing, Marlin thanks Dory and tells her he is going home on his own. Dory, however, is reluctant to be left by herself again, claiming that she can remember things better when he is around. Marlin still swims away to go home, leaving Dory hopelessly lost and confused. A chance encounter with Nemo jogs her memory and she is able to reunite him with Marlin. Moments later, Dory is caught in a fishing net along with a school of grouper. Nemo has an idea to save her by telling the fish caught in the net to swim down, a trick the other fish in the tank had tried to use to save him from being scooped up in the dentist's net. Though Marlin is afraid to let him go out of fear of losing him again, he realizes that he has to let Nemo take this chance. The maneuver works, freeing Dory and the grouper, and Marlin reconciles with Nemo and apologizes for being overprotective.
Once they have returned home, Marlin is able to let Nemo "go have an adventure" at school, and he impresses and wins the respect of his neighbors for going across the ocean to find his son. In the epilogue, the automatic cleaner/filter in the dentist's fish tank breaks down, forcing him to put all the fish in plastic bags while he cleans it out; they soon reach the ocean, but are, hilariously, still stuck in their bags.
Trivia: Three of the cast members (Albert Brooks, Alexander Gould and Elizabeth Perkins) co-star in the Showtime series Weeds.
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 began, 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 [1].
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.[4]
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 Rotten Tomatoes and four stars from Empire.[5]
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.[6] As of 2004[update], 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 occur.)[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. 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.
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." 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]
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.[12]
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.[13][14] 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.
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.[15] 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.[16] 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."[17] 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."[17]
The forty minute 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 or transferred to Broadway, though Walt Disney Parks & Resorts executive Ann Hamburger has said that "she would love for that to happen."[17] Nemo is notable for being the first non-musical animated film to which Disney has added songs to produce a stage musical.
One Pixar tradition is to create one trailer for each of their films that contains no footage from the actual unreleased film. The trailer for this film:
| Preceded by Monsters, Inc. |
Pixar Animation Studios feature films 2003 |
Succeeded by The Incredibles |
| Preceded by Bruce Almighty |
List of 2003 Box Office 2003-06-01 |
Succeeded by Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd |
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