The opening scene to Pixar’s Finding Nemo was originally told in flashbacks.
Speaking with UNILAD, animator Jason Deamer revealed that the opening scene to Finding Nemo was a last-minute addition to the Pixar movie.
“Originally you found out [about Nemo’s mother’s death] through flashbacks,” he explained. “We all went to the last screening before it was going to be finished, and we all walked out the theater and no one was saying anything. [We thought] ‘Did we just just make our first bad movie?’ We were a little concerned, and [co-director] Lee Unkrick said ‘Let me try something’, and he took those flashbacks and he recut them all in the beginning.”
Deamer explains why Finding Nemo needed a ‘heart-wrenching’ opening
He continued, “When you didn’t know [about Nemo’s mother’s death] in the beginning, you thought Marlin was an overprotective, annoying character. It was the same footage. We didn’t animate anything new. [Unkrick] just told the audience that sooner. I know it’s heart-wrenching, but otherwise you just didn’t empathize with [Marlin’s] overprotective behavior.”
Finding Nemo, which is currently streaming on Disney+, was directed and co-written by Andrew Stanton. Released in 2003, the film made approximately $940.3 million at the global box office off of an estimated budget of $94 million. It spawned a sequel, Finding Dory, that was released in 2016.
The voice cast of Finding Nemo includes Albert Brooks as Marlin, Ellen DeGeneres as Dory, Alexander Gould as Nemo, Willem Dafoe as Gill, Brad Garrett as Bloat, Allison Janney as Peach, Stephen Root as Bubbles, Geoffrey Rush as Nigel, Stanton as Crush, and Barry Humphries as Bruce.
Pixar’s next film is Inside Out 2, a sequel to 2015’s Inside Out. Directed by Kelsey Mann, Inside Out 2 releases in United States theaters on June 14, 2024.
