Finding Nemo Article
Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2003 10:56 pm
Here's a great article I read in my issue of Entertainment Weekly that I got today.
Big Fish
How ''Finding Nemo'' hooked more cash than ''Matrix'' -- Pixar's latest sank the competition to become the movie catch of the summer by Steve Daly
There's a telling gag buried at the bottom of the closing credits of Pixar Animation Studios' deep-sea fable ''Finding Nemo.'' A tiny green fish with bugged-out eyes, whom we've seen before as the terrified guest of vegetarian sharks, wriggles onto the screen. Behind him, an angler fish bristling with teeth -- the same brute who nearly eats the story's heroes, anxious single-dad clown fish Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks) and memory-impaired blue tang Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) -- glides up and prepares to chomp. But suddenly the little guy opens impossibly wide jaws and KARRUMP -- he swallows the angler whole.
The movie's last laugh couldn't be more appropriate, since Pixar has now officially devoured what were supposed to be more voracious competitors in the summer box office race. So much for forecasts that ''The Matrix Reloaded'' would prove the season's hottest piece of software. Or that ''The Hulk'' would fillet ''Nemo'' once it opened. Instead, over the Fourth of July weekend, ''Nemo'' passed ''Reloaded'' to become 2003's top grosser at $275 million, and also passed DreamWorks' ''Shrek'' to become the highest-grossing computer-animated movie ever. Some box office analysts think ''Nemo'' even has a shot at outswimming Disney's 1994 hand-drawn opus ''The Lion King,'' the all-time 'toon champ, which commanded an initial domestic gross of $313 million (upped to $329 million with a recent IMAX reissue).
More important for Pixar's and Disney's pride, the rapturously reviewed ''Nemo'' could become the first cartoon feature since 1991's ''Beauty and the Beast'' to capture a Best Picture Academy Award nomination. (Best Animated Feature is, at this point, a done deal.) Since Pixar's five movies -- the two ''Toy Story'' films, ''A Bug's Life,'' ''Monsters, Inc.,'' and ''Nemo'' -- have now grossed a combined $1.1 billion at North American theaters, betting against them in anything, including an awards derby, would be a fool's game.
At a time when so many mainstream Hollywood movies are disappointing audiences and critics, how does Pixar do it?
The company's exceptionally bright, happy workforce of 700 or so, headquartered far from Los Angeles in an atrium-bisected building a few miles east of San Francisco's Bay Bridge, exudes a certain men-in-black, true-believer aura. They're employee-apostles. When outsiders visit, the required name tag carries the warning ''A stranger from the outside!'' quoting the little tri-eyed aliens from ''Toy Story.'' Clearly, Pixar doesn't want anybody spilling beans about upcoming movies until it's ready to promote them with its distribution partner, the Walt Disney Co.
But Pixar president Edwin Catmull isn't too worried about giving away more general creative secrets, since in his experience Hollywood has proved unable to clone Pixar's unique culture. Once a new movie hits theaters after a four-year gestation-to-graduation cycle, the staff tends to codify the life lessons involved as part of producing the inevitable DVD. Here's what they say they learned refining ''Nemo'':
CREATING BEATS ADAPTING. Pixar has doggedly stuck to crafting its own stories and characters, eschewing retellings of fairy tales or best-selling books. ''Original stories are the hardest things to do,'' says ''Nemo'' director Andrew Stanton, who cowrote the script with Pixar story man Bob Peterson and Disney freelancer David Reynolds. (Stanton also cowrote Pixar's previous four movies.) ''At least, my writer's pride would like to think that. But they're more satisfying when you're done.'' Management backed up that sentiment by allowing ''Nemo'''s narrative to grow and morph repeatedly all through production -- and Stanton had been nursing the basic ideas since the early '90s.
LET THE MILIEU OBSESS YOU. Director John Lasseter, who spearheaded Pixar's first three features and exec-produced ''Monsters, Inc.'' and ''Nemo,'' pushes the staff hard to do research, research, research. He urged the ''Nemo'' principals to become certified scuba divers, as he is, the better to inform their approach. ''Every character's personality in 'Nemo' is based on a real sea creature,'' says Lasseter. ''Dory is based on certain types of fish that really don't have short-term memories. They live literally for the moment, for what's in front of them.'' (DeGeneres' initial response to that fact was ''What do they do, take a test?'') And Stanton based ''Nemo'''s fishnet great-escape finale on a tiny newspaper article about a trawler boat that capsized off Oslo when all the fish swam downward.
BEWARE FORMULAS. Worried that Pixar was sliding into musical predictability, Stanton insisted that ''Nemo'' not feature a Randy Newman score, as previous Pixar flicks did. And please, not another buddy song over the credits, à la ''Toy Story'' and ''Monsters, Inc.'' ''We were on the verge of being pegged,'' says Stanton. Instead, Pixar hired Randy Newman's cousin Thomas, a five-time Oscar nominee whose composing credits include the ''Six Feet Under'' theme and ''The Shawshank Redemption,'' to come aboard as composer. Another old favorite that was scrapped before it got stale: outtakes in the final reel.
IT'S NEVER TOO LATE FOR REWRITES. Less than a year before ''Toy Story 2'' hit theaters, Pixar completely overhauled the film because, says Stanton, ''it sucked.'' Nothing as dramatic happened on ''Nemo,'' but there were still missteps that required brave mea culpas. The finished movie opens with a barracuda eating poor clown fish Marlin's family, leaving behind only the devastated dad and his fin-damaged son, Nemo. Through a good part of the production, Stanton insisted this defining trauma be doled out piecemeal, via flashbacks. But that made Marlin whiny, unlikable, and inscrutable. Once the narrative was made linear, the problem was solved.
COMEDIANS WORK BETTER THAN THESPIANS FOR CARTOONS. Eager to play up the scenario's serious side, Stanton initially made a huge mistake -- he hired a dramatic actor to voice Marlin. (Out of deference to the fellow's good-faith work, nobody at Pixar will say who it was, though they dismiss website reports that it was Geoffrey Rush, who plays a supporting-pelican role in the final movie.) ''It wasn't the actor's fault,'' says Stanton. ''It was my fault. I cast wrong. I realized...that because animation is at its core an exaggeration, a caricature, it automatically puts you in the playing field of comedy. It requires a performer who's slightly exaggerated themselves.'' Only in hindsight did the filmmakers realize that every previous Pixar flick employed seasoned comedians, from Tom Hanks and Tim Allen to Dave Foley and Julia Louis-Dreyfus to Billy Crystal and John Goodman. (For an example of what can go wrong when big-name actors are hired instead of great voices, see ''Sinbad''; you'll be one of the few who do.)
BEGGING CAN WORK. Stanton had thought of dim-witted Dory as a male fish until he overheard Ellen DeGeneres doing a stream-of-consciousness routine on her sitcom one night. Without approaching her reps, he began to rewrite the part specifically for the comedienne, and he was way into it before he asked her if she'd do the voice. ''When I called her up,'' Stanton recalls, ''all I said was 'Ellen, I'm basically f---ed if you don't take this role.' She goes, 'Well, I better do it then!' Easiest pitch ever.''
SOMETIMES YOU DON'T NEED PROFESSIONALS. Several Pixar insiders wound up vocalizing key roles in ''Nemo'' when they couldn't find somebody better-known to tap. They include Pixar director Brad Bird's 8-year-old son, Nicholas, as little turtle Squirt; and Stanton, whose multiple turns include stoner/wise-man tortoise Crush, a New England-accented lobster, and those maddening, monosyllabic seagulls (''Mine! Mine!''). Stanton's respective inspirations? California surfer-dude cousins, Northeastern friends, and the ever-present ''rats of the sky'' he came to hate while growing up in Rockport, Mass. Foreign-translation grace note: In every country, the seagulls will scream the native word for ''mine,'' though it won't be Stanton speaking.
DON'T TALK BABY TALK. Despite Pixar's consistent G ratings, the films aren't actually aimed at children. ''Some people might find that hard to understand, or even believe,'' says president Catmull. ''But the stories and themes are things we as adults think people are wrestling with in their own lives.'' That doesn't mean spicing up scripts with semi-off-color remarks like, say, the nipple joke in ''Sinbad.'' It means thematic sophistication. In ''Toy Story 2,'' for instance, what was the cowboy-Woody-as-vain-collectible subplot but a meditation on fears of aging and death?
And in ''Nemo,'' the action focuses on grown-ups more than the titular kid. Marlin's doomed attempts to shelter his only son from any danger in life resonate with parents -- especially Stanton himself, who has an 11-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter. ''Marlin is the father I'm afraid I was turning into,'' he says. ''I'm very fearful...[and] to me, the movie's about something bigger than a father-son story. It's about fear. How you can either be afraid or you can live.'' Now ''Finding Nemo'''s overriding life lesson -- that sometimes you have to take a big risk to get a big reward -- is something that the Pixar team can take to the bank, laughing all the way.
There was also a cool little thing titled "'Toon Adventures" talking about the animated films planned for the next couple of years. It pretty much confirms Brother Bear as #43 (DUH, you already knew that) and Home on the Range (formerly Sweating Bullets) as #44 for an April 2004 release. In the section of Computer Animated films it talks about Disney releasing a 2005 feature called Angel And Her No Good Sister that mixes CG with 2-D. The only reason I ask this is because it mentions 2-D [BTW, Disney is the only film releasing 2-D films through 2005], but could this be #45?
Big Fish
How ''Finding Nemo'' hooked more cash than ''Matrix'' -- Pixar's latest sank the competition to become the movie catch of the summer by Steve Daly
There's a telling gag buried at the bottom of the closing credits of Pixar Animation Studios' deep-sea fable ''Finding Nemo.'' A tiny green fish with bugged-out eyes, whom we've seen before as the terrified guest of vegetarian sharks, wriggles onto the screen. Behind him, an angler fish bristling with teeth -- the same brute who nearly eats the story's heroes, anxious single-dad clown fish Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks) and memory-impaired blue tang Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) -- glides up and prepares to chomp. But suddenly the little guy opens impossibly wide jaws and KARRUMP -- he swallows the angler whole.
The movie's last laugh couldn't be more appropriate, since Pixar has now officially devoured what were supposed to be more voracious competitors in the summer box office race. So much for forecasts that ''The Matrix Reloaded'' would prove the season's hottest piece of software. Or that ''The Hulk'' would fillet ''Nemo'' once it opened. Instead, over the Fourth of July weekend, ''Nemo'' passed ''Reloaded'' to become 2003's top grosser at $275 million, and also passed DreamWorks' ''Shrek'' to become the highest-grossing computer-animated movie ever. Some box office analysts think ''Nemo'' even has a shot at outswimming Disney's 1994 hand-drawn opus ''The Lion King,'' the all-time 'toon champ, which commanded an initial domestic gross of $313 million (upped to $329 million with a recent IMAX reissue).
More important for Pixar's and Disney's pride, the rapturously reviewed ''Nemo'' could become the first cartoon feature since 1991's ''Beauty and the Beast'' to capture a Best Picture Academy Award nomination. (Best Animated Feature is, at this point, a done deal.) Since Pixar's five movies -- the two ''Toy Story'' films, ''A Bug's Life,'' ''Monsters, Inc.,'' and ''Nemo'' -- have now grossed a combined $1.1 billion at North American theaters, betting against them in anything, including an awards derby, would be a fool's game.
At a time when so many mainstream Hollywood movies are disappointing audiences and critics, how does Pixar do it?
The company's exceptionally bright, happy workforce of 700 or so, headquartered far from Los Angeles in an atrium-bisected building a few miles east of San Francisco's Bay Bridge, exudes a certain men-in-black, true-believer aura. They're employee-apostles. When outsiders visit, the required name tag carries the warning ''A stranger from the outside!'' quoting the little tri-eyed aliens from ''Toy Story.'' Clearly, Pixar doesn't want anybody spilling beans about upcoming movies until it's ready to promote them with its distribution partner, the Walt Disney Co.
But Pixar president Edwin Catmull isn't too worried about giving away more general creative secrets, since in his experience Hollywood has proved unable to clone Pixar's unique culture. Once a new movie hits theaters after a four-year gestation-to-graduation cycle, the staff tends to codify the life lessons involved as part of producing the inevitable DVD. Here's what they say they learned refining ''Nemo'':
CREATING BEATS ADAPTING. Pixar has doggedly stuck to crafting its own stories and characters, eschewing retellings of fairy tales or best-selling books. ''Original stories are the hardest things to do,'' says ''Nemo'' director Andrew Stanton, who cowrote the script with Pixar story man Bob Peterson and Disney freelancer David Reynolds. (Stanton also cowrote Pixar's previous four movies.) ''At least, my writer's pride would like to think that. But they're more satisfying when you're done.'' Management backed up that sentiment by allowing ''Nemo'''s narrative to grow and morph repeatedly all through production -- and Stanton had been nursing the basic ideas since the early '90s.
LET THE MILIEU OBSESS YOU. Director John Lasseter, who spearheaded Pixar's first three features and exec-produced ''Monsters, Inc.'' and ''Nemo,'' pushes the staff hard to do research, research, research. He urged the ''Nemo'' principals to become certified scuba divers, as he is, the better to inform their approach. ''Every character's personality in 'Nemo' is based on a real sea creature,'' says Lasseter. ''Dory is based on certain types of fish that really don't have short-term memories. They live literally for the moment, for what's in front of them.'' (DeGeneres' initial response to that fact was ''What do they do, take a test?'') And Stanton based ''Nemo'''s fishnet great-escape finale on a tiny newspaper article about a trawler boat that capsized off Oslo when all the fish swam downward.
BEWARE FORMULAS. Worried that Pixar was sliding into musical predictability, Stanton insisted that ''Nemo'' not feature a Randy Newman score, as previous Pixar flicks did. And please, not another buddy song over the credits, à la ''Toy Story'' and ''Monsters, Inc.'' ''We were on the verge of being pegged,'' says Stanton. Instead, Pixar hired Randy Newman's cousin Thomas, a five-time Oscar nominee whose composing credits include the ''Six Feet Under'' theme and ''The Shawshank Redemption,'' to come aboard as composer. Another old favorite that was scrapped before it got stale: outtakes in the final reel.
IT'S NEVER TOO LATE FOR REWRITES. Less than a year before ''Toy Story 2'' hit theaters, Pixar completely overhauled the film because, says Stanton, ''it sucked.'' Nothing as dramatic happened on ''Nemo,'' but there were still missteps that required brave mea culpas. The finished movie opens with a barracuda eating poor clown fish Marlin's family, leaving behind only the devastated dad and his fin-damaged son, Nemo. Through a good part of the production, Stanton insisted this defining trauma be doled out piecemeal, via flashbacks. But that made Marlin whiny, unlikable, and inscrutable. Once the narrative was made linear, the problem was solved.
COMEDIANS WORK BETTER THAN THESPIANS FOR CARTOONS. Eager to play up the scenario's serious side, Stanton initially made a huge mistake -- he hired a dramatic actor to voice Marlin. (Out of deference to the fellow's good-faith work, nobody at Pixar will say who it was, though they dismiss website reports that it was Geoffrey Rush, who plays a supporting-pelican role in the final movie.) ''It wasn't the actor's fault,'' says Stanton. ''It was my fault. I cast wrong. I realized...that because animation is at its core an exaggeration, a caricature, it automatically puts you in the playing field of comedy. It requires a performer who's slightly exaggerated themselves.'' Only in hindsight did the filmmakers realize that every previous Pixar flick employed seasoned comedians, from Tom Hanks and Tim Allen to Dave Foley and Julia Louis-Dreyfus to Billy Crystal and John Goodman. (For an example of what can go wrong when big-name actors are hired instead of great voices, see ''Sinbad''; you'll be one of the few who do.)
BEGGING CAN WORK. Stanton had thought of dim-witted Dory as a male fish until he overheard Ellen DeGeneres doing a stream-of-consciousness routine on her sitcom one night. Without approaching her reps, he began to rewrite the part specifically for the comedienne, and he was way into it before he asked her if she'd do the voice. ''When I called her up,'' Stanton recalls, ''all I said was 'Ellen, I'm basically f---ed if you don't take this role.' She goes, 'Well, I better do it then!' Easiest pitch ever.''
SOMETIMES YOU DON'T NEED PROFESSIONALS. Several Pixar insiders wound up vocalizing key roles in ''Nemo'' when they couldn't find somebody better-known to tap. They include Pixar director Brad Bird's 8-year-old son, Nicholas, as little turtle Squirt; and Stanton, whose multiple turns include stoner/wise-man tortoise Crush, a New England-accented lobster, and those maddening, monosyllabic seagulls (''Mine! Mine!''). Stanton's respective inspirations? California surfer-dude cousins, Northeastern friends, and the ever-present ''rats of the sky'' he came to hate while growing up in Rockport, Mass. Foreign-translation grace note: In every country, the seagulls will scream the native word for ''mine,'' though it won't be Stanton speaking.
DON'T TALK BABY TALK. Despite Pixar's consistent G ratings, the films aren't actually aimed at children. ''Some people might find that hard to understand, or even believe,'' says president Catmull. ''But the stories and themes are things we as adults think people are wrestling with in their own lives.'' That doesn't mean spicing up scripts with semi-off-color remarks like, say, the nipple joke in ''Sinbad.'' It means thematic sophistication. In ''Toy Story 2,'' for instance, what was the cowboy-Woody-as-vain-collectible subplot but a meditation on fears of aging and death?
And in ''Nemo,'' the action focuses on grown-ups more than the titular kid. Marlin's doomed attempts to shelter his only son from any danger in life resonate with parents -- especially Stanton himself, who has an 11-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter. ''Marlin is the father I'm afraid I was turning into,'' he says. ''I'm very fearful...[and] to me, the movie's about something bigger than a father-son story. It's about fear. How you can either be afraid or you can live.'' Now ''Finding Nemo'''s overriding life lesson -- that sometimes you have to take a big risk to get a big reward -- is something that the Pixar team can take to the bank, laughing all the way.
There was also a cool little thing titled "'Toon Adventures" talking about the animated films planned for the next couple of years. It pretty much confirms Brother Bear as #43 (DUH, you already knew that) and Home on the Range (formerly Sweating Bullets) as #44 for an April 2004 release. In the section of Computer Animated films it talks about Disney releasing a 2005 feature called Angel And Her No Good Sister that mixes CG with 2-D. The only reason I ask this is because it mentions 2-D [BTW, Disney is the only film releasing 2-D films through 2005], but could this be #45?
