Finding Nemo and The Pixar Template
Finding Nemo. Image courtesy of Pixar.
If there were any doubts about Pixar being a new industry giant when it released Monsters, Inc. then Finding Nemo firmly banished them. Nemo was and continues to be one of Pixar’s most popular and profitable films. It has generated $940 million at the box office, ten times its budget and nearly twice what Monsters, Inc. did. It remains one of the highest-grossing Pixar movies to date, and critics loved it. Ellen DeGeneres as the memory impaired Dory was especially memorable.
Like its predecesors, Finding Nemo makes full use of technology to animate a deeply immersive fantasy ocean world and give us a glimpse into the imagined lives of the world’s sea dwellers. It again populates its world with memorable characters expertly voice acted, and sends them along a fairly simple and easily relatable undersea adventure yarn about fatherhood and loss and grief. To be honest I have never rated Finding Nemo that high on my list of Pixar films, but clearly many people do and have signaled as much by giving Pixar many hundreds of millions of their dollars.
At this point, Pixar was working from a pretty full-proof template and Nemo’s box office proved that. The film made such a splash that The Age actually wondered if it might be able to rescue Australia’s tourism industry. Staging the majority of the film underwater, and taking into account all of the fluid dynamics involved in that, was an ambitious technical undertaking and Nemo, like all Pixar films, aimed to not just tell a story but to expand the limits of what was technologically possible with digital animation.
But it really just shows that by 2003 with a string of hits under its belt, Pixar was really cooking with gas. It was scaling up production and development so it could get one film out per year or so, and it had a template for making inventive, beautifully animated and often very touching mega-blockbusters. Of course, it still brought in top-tier talent but by the time Nemo hit theaters the studio was working from a pretty full-proof template.
