Attempt at Realism

Finding Nemo

Along with many of the other Pixar films, Finding Nemo involves bright and uniquely styled animation technique.  During the making of this movie, the animators faced the challenge of finding new ways to make fish as expressive as possible.  Their goal was to make them look appealing and loveable, while also paying attention to the physical and optical laws of nature.

In order to represent life under the sea in a realistic way, the animators in Finding Nemo constantly paid attention to creating a sense of density, distance and the use of sunlight.  When the movie came out, in May 2003, John Lasseter commented that "Our only challenge was to let the audience know that our ocean is caricatured.  We wanted them to know that this wonderful world doesn't exist, but then using the animation tools that we have in computer animation make it look totally believable.  Our goal is always to make things believable, not realistic.  By stylising the design of things, adding more geometry and pushing the colours, we were able to create a natural and credible world for our characters."

Finding Nemo is beautifully animated with pastels, while it also makes attempts at making the fish look as real as possible.  The backgrounds in the movie are equivalent to the wilderness backgrounds in films such as Princess Mononoke and Bambi.  Ralph Eggleston was the film's production designer offered some first hand insight; "One of our first priorities was to make the fish seem appealing.  Fish are slimy, scaly things and we wanted to make the audience love our characters.  One way to make them more attractive was to make them luminous.  We ultimately came up with three finds of fish- gummy, velvety, and metallic.  The gummy variety, which includes Marlin and Nemo, has a density and warmth to it.  We used backlighting and rim lights to add to their appeal and take the focus off their scaly surface quality.  The velvety category, which includes Dory, has a soft texture to it.  The metallic group was more of the typical scaly fish.  We used this for the schools of fish."

Pixar also uses lighting and shading to create the allusion of realism.  Dylan Brown, the supervisor of Finding Nemo, commented that; "another big factor was timing.  With characters like Buzz, Woody or Sulley, you have an earth-based gravity.  But fish underwater can travel three feet in a flash.  You blink and the thing is gone.  We were wondering how they did that and studied their movements on video.  By slowing things down, we could figure it out.  Our timing for very crisp as we learned how to get our fish characters from one place to another in the course of a frame or two.  We always tried to incorporate naturalistic fish movements into the acting.  By putting things like one-frame darting and transitioning from one place to another into our acting, the characters became very believable."






Clarke, James. The Films of Pixar Animation Studio. Kamera Books, 2013.

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