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Finding Nemo

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This article is about the film. For the video game based on it, see Finding Nemo (video game).
Finding Nemo
Original theatrical poster
Directed byAndrew Stanton
co-director
Lee Unkrich
Written byStory
Andrew Stanton
Screenplay
Andrew Stanton
Bob Peterson
David Reynolds
Produced byGraham Walters
Executive producer
John Lasseter
Associate producer
Jinko Gotoh
StarringAlbert Brooks
Ellen DeGeneres
Alexander Gould
Willem Dafoe
Brad Garrett
Joe Ranft
Allison Janney
Vicki Lewis
Austin Pendleton
Stephen Root
Geoffrey Rush
Nicholas Bird
Barry Humphries
Lulu Ebeling
CinematographySharon Calahan
Jeremy Lasky
Edited byDavid Ian Salter
Music byThomas Newman
Production
company
Distributed byWalt Disney Pictures
Release date
May 30, 2003 (2003-05-30)
Running time
100 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$94 million[1]
Box office$864,625,978[1]

Finding Nemo is a 2003 American computer-animated film written by Andrew Stanton, directed by Stanton and Lee Unkrich and produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. It tells the story of the overly protective clownfish Marlin, voiced by Albert Brooks, who along with a regal tang called Dory, voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, searches for his son Nemo, voiced by 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] and is the highest grossing G-rated movie of all time. In 2008, the American Film Institute named it the tenth greatest animated film ever made during their 10 Top 10. It was also the first Pixar animations studio film not to be released in November and the second Pixar film to star Brad Garret (after A Bug's Life where he played Dim the beetle).[3]

Plot

Marlin, a clownfish, takes extra care of his only child, Nemo, after his wife Coral and the rest of their eggs were eaten by a barracuda. Due to a crack in Nemo's egg, he has grown up with one small, weak fin, but which Marlin assures him is his "lucky fin". On the first day of school, the other kids tease Nemo about his overprotective widower father. Nemo decides to swim into the open waters to prove that he is capable. He touches a boat but is quickly captured by a scuba diver. While the other scuba diver takes pictures of marlin they climb aboard the boat and drives off. Marlin is unable to keep up after a frantic chase but meets Dory, a regal tang with short-term memory loss. Together they discover a diver's mask on the ocean floor dropped from the boat, and Dory is able to read the address on it as being Sydney, Australia. The two set off; Marlin's story of determination quickly spreads about the oceans, and various sea creatures give aid to his search.

Meanwhile, the diver, a dentist, returns to his office and places Nemo in a fish tank. Nemo meets the other fish, led by the moorish idol Gill who leads a gang of fishes that are brought to the tank, named the tank gang. When they realize that the dentist plans to give Nemo to his niece Darla, who has had a fatal history of dealing with pets before, they incorporate him into the latest of their many escape plans. Gill proposes that they clog the filter, causing the tank to become dirty, requiring the dentist to remove the fish into little plastic bags, allowing them to escape out the window and roll to the ocean. The plan requires Nemo, the smallest of them, to swim up the water filter and disable it; the first attempt is nearly fatal for Nemo, but is able to succeed on a second attempt when he hears from Nigel, a brown pelican, that Marlin is coming for him. However instead of taking the fish out of the tank the Dentist instead installs a high-tech laser-scanning filter which automatically cleans the tank while the fish are sleeping without a notice this is happening.

After several adventures, 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 let him go, 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 of the dentist is broken and the tank gang have already escaped and return back to the ocean, still in their plastic cleaning bags. The gang cheer and Bloat asks "Now what?" and the film closes with a special part of the film; Robbie Williams's version of the song Beyond the Sea playing.

Voice cast

Production

In an interview with National Geographic magazine, Andrew Stanton stated that the idea for the character of Nemo came from a photograph of two clownfish peeking out of an anemone:

"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, an average of 89% on Metacritic and four stars from Empire.[7]

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, 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 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.[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.

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.[12][13] Queensland, Australia also used Finding Nemo to draw tourists to promote its state for vacationers.[14]

Awards

Main article: List of Pixar awards and nominations (feature films) § Finding Nemo

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:

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.[16][17] 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.

Music

Main article: Finding Nemo (soundtrack)

Finding Nemo - The Musical

File:NemoTurtle.jpg
Larger-than-life puppets in a scene from the stage adaptation of Finding Nemo at Disney's Animal Kingdom.
Entrance.

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.[18] 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.[19] 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."[20] 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."[20]

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.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c "Finding Nemo (2002)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved 2009-02-05.
  2. ^ Boone, Louis E. Contemporary Business 2006, Thomson South-Western, page 4 - ISBN 0324320892
  3. ^ AFI: 10 Top 10
  4. ^ Beautiful Friendship National Geographic magazine, January 2010
  5. ^ Megan Mullally - Megan Mullally Dropped From Finding Nemo
  6. ^ "Top Grossing Films of 2003". Boxofficemojo.com.
  7. ^ "Finding Nemo (2002)". Rotten Tomatoes.com. Retrieved 2008-02-12.
  8. ^ Jackson, Elizabeth (November 29, 2002). "Acquiring Nemo". The Business Report. Retrieved 2006-11-10.
  9. ^ Corcoran, Mark (November 9, 2002). "Vanuatu - Saving Nemo". ABC Foreign Correspondent. Retrieved 2006-10-23.
  10. ^ Company Warns of 'Grinding Nemo', FoxNews.com/AP, June 6, 2003.
  11. ^ Sydney Water. "Coastal sewage treatment plants operated by Sydney Water". Sydney Water. Retrieved 2006-11-26.
  12. ^ http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-08/18/content_255968.htm
  13. ^ Mitchell, Peter (November 3, 2002). "Nemo-led recovery hope". The Age. Retrieved 2006-10-23.
  14. ^ Dennis, Anthony (February 11, 2003). "Sydney ignores Nemo". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2006-10-23.
  15. ^ Awards for Finding Nemo (Retrieved on February 12, 2008)
  16. ^ American Film Institute (2008-06-17). "AFI Crowns Top 10 Films in 10 Classic Genres". ComingSoon.net. Retrieved 2008-08-18.
  17. ^ "Top Ten Animation". www.afi.com. Retrieved 2008-06-18.
  18. ^ Finding Nemo - The Musical, Walt Disney World Magic.
  19. ^ Hernandez, Ernio. "Avenue Q Composer Lopez Co-Pens Musical Finding Nemo for Disney," Playbill.com (April 10, 2006).
  20. ^ a b Maupin, Elizabeth (2006-11-26). "Swimming with big fish". Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved 2007-03-22.
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