Finding Nemo

Toy Story is where Pixar worked out its house structure and Finding Nemo is that structure applied again: a mismatched pair forced to travel together, a world with strict internal rules played completely straight, and comedy that never lowers the emotional stakes. It also fixed the production rule the studio kept, that the story is locked long before animation begins, which is why the films of that decade hold together. Filed MEDIUM: one studio developing its own method, recorded for the same reason a director's development is.

Bambi established that an animated film for children could open by killing a parent off screen and spend the rest of its running time on what that does to the child. Finding Nemo opens the same way and is unusual in making the SURVIVING parent the protagonist: Marlin's overprotection is the consequence the earlier film left implied. The structural debt is the permission, which every Disney and Pixar film since has used. Filed MEDIUM: a foundational convention rather than a borrowing anyone has stated.

The Pixar crew learned to dive for it. Andrew Stanton and the team took scuba training, dived on reefs, and brought in a marine biologist to lecture the studio; the art department worked from reef photography and from tanks kept on site. What that bought is specific rather than decorative: the clownfish and anemone relationship is the film's premise and is correct, the sea turtles ride the East Australian Current as they really do, the anglerfish uses its lure in the dark zone, and the animation of each species moves the way that species moves. Stanton has said the idea came from watching clownfish in a dentist's tank as a child and then from a visit to Marine World. The film's one large liberty, the clownfish life cycle, is well known and was a deliberate choice rather than an error.