Finding Nemo 4: A New Continuation

But even two years into the development process, when the need to start producing finished animation was looming large, a major narrative issue had yet to be ironed out.

“There was some glass ceiling on why our story wasn’t getting better,” Stanton admits, saying that the problem had to do with having a protagonist with short-term memory loss.

“There were a lot of plot changes but none of these were huge factors. The big thing that started to reveal itself [was] we were never getting that deeply, emotionally, invested in Dory. We finally deduced she never self-reflected because she couldn’t remember things. She couldn’t express the growth that was going on. But how to solve it turned out to be just as difficult. We never found one answer. We had many small answers. And those trickled in almost to the last minute.”

Even at the end of 2015, significant changes were still being made to the story, with the addition of several flashbacks of Dory as a young fish.

“That was probably the last piece to fall into place,” Stanton notes. “To be honest, we’re always working to the bitter end, but to have that big of an idea that late is not fun.”

In the 13 years between  Nemo  and  Dory, CG animation technology has improved immeasurably but, for Stanton, the biggest difference was the ability to animate water.

“Water was very hard to capture and get right and very expensive, and when you look at  Nemo  there are very few shots where we actually show water. Most of the water is a magic trick where we make you think you’re underwater. You can now do it easily, so I went to town. I would say every five minutes of  Dory  is the entirety of what we could do in  Nemo .”

Finding Dory  was released in June to universally positive reviews. It has grossed in excess of $1bn worldwide, making it the most successful sequel in a summer of belated follow-ups. Inevitably, talk has already turned to whether there’ll be a third. Stanton, who is currently working on a number of live-action projects, in addition to his role as vice-president of creative at Pixar, doesn’t rule it out; just don’t expect him to direct it.

“Will there be another one? I’ve stopped saying never, but I have now spent eight years with fish. That’s a fifth of my life. I don’t really want to spend another four years with fish, as much as I enjoyed those eight. Hopefully somebody else will - if there is that great of an idea.”

PERSONAL CONNECTION
Finding Dory  may feature a mainly aquatic cast, but that doesn’t stop it being somewhat autobiographical, according to co-writer/director Andrew Stanton.

“Dory is what I remember being as a kid, and feel I lost,” he reveals. “I have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and I took that to the nth degree with being a father, a husband and a member of [Pixar] as it was being built up. I’ve often missed the joy of just being caught in the now. And it seemed even harder by the time I was writing [ Finding Nemo ] and seeing it in my kids - how present they were, and how hard it was for me to be present with them and not always be worried about something. So, Marlin is who I am, and Dory is who I’ve always wanted to be. I think that’s why Dory is popular, because [she represents] an unconscious desire to be free of the anxieties and the fears of the future and the past.”

VOICES OF THE DEEP
Alongside the returning voice talents of Ellen DeGeneres and Albert Brooks,  Finding Dory  adds Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy as Dory’s parents, and Idris Elba and Dominic West as a pair of grouchy sea lions. (“My thinly veiled excuse to get a  Wire  reunion,” laughs Andrew Stanton of the HBO show that starred the pair.)

While today’s Hollywood may greenlight a sequel mere days after a profitable release, the whopping success of  Nemo  back in 2003 (it was the second highest-grossing film of the year following  The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King ) didn’t beget an immediate response from the studio. “There was zero discussion of a sequel,” director/writer Andrew Stanton says of the Monday following  Nemo ’s release, and, truthfully, the weeks, months, and years following it.

The silence worked for Stanton too, as the director eschewed the possibility of a follow-up to the beloved Pixar original. But it’s almost miraculous that a sequel wasn’t greenlit in the days or decade after  Nemo ’s tremendous opening weekend in 2003. Then again, churning out a hastily-crafted film in response to commercial success isn’t exactly the Pixar model. “We’ve never had those kind of discussions here,” says Stanton. “The only time they may have occurred, as far as that typical executive speak of, ‘Oh, we got a hit and we want another one,’ was when there was a lot of battling between Steve [Jobs] and [Michael] Eisner about  Toy Story 2  and  3. But prior to that and even post-that, any discussion of sequels has always just been story-based.”

Stanton says it was the grand experiment of  Toy Story 2  – the third movie on Pixar’s resume, and a sequel – that taught him and his colleagues the hard lesson about treading carefully with follow-ups (even though the film grossed $485 million worldwide and isn’t considered a misstep by any means). “That was the only time we started for commercial reasons, and almost failed because of it and we took a huge lesson from that,” he says. “We should not approach any movie, no matter whether it comes from a universe pre-existing or if it’s completely original, any differently. It should be inspired by a kernel of an idea for a story that we’re going to want to battle for four years.”

So, Stanton was vocal about staying away from any sort of sequel to  Nemo  lest the story demanded it – and for a decade, it didn’t. When Stanton rewatched  Finding Nemo  during the film’s conversion into 3-D in 2010, he stumbled onto a new realization about Dory’s welfare. As a father himself, Stanton found himself wondering whether the forgetful Dory would be okay on her own, should she get separated from her de facto new family of Marlin and Nemo. Surely, a sequel slam dunk, no?

Stanton sat on the kernel for months, sharing it only with a few key people at Pixar, still hesitant to shout it from the rooftops that, finally, a story had been hatched for a sequel, and  Nemo  could finally join other Pixar franchises like  Toy Story, Cars, and  Monsters Inc. “I knew nobody was going to argue with making a sequel, and I was actually more of the opposite – I was very paranoid, like, ‘We’re not going to say the words ‘ Finding  anything’ out loud to anybody, including in-house,” he says. “I just knew the minute those words came out of my mouth, I’d never be able… the horse would be out of the barn, and we’d never be able to put it back in.”

As evidenced by  Dory  winning praise from critics and dollars from ticket buyers, that proved to be a smart decision. But the success of  Dory  in 2016 demands a different response than the one afforded  Nemo  in 2003: Could audiences expect to see a third  Nemo  narrative sooner than later? Or is the  Nemo  world closed once more for another decade, box office performance be damned?

“I really do feel like this was the missing piece, emotionally, for the first movie,” Stanton tells EW of  Finding Nemo 3  possibilities. “Now, I’ve stopped saying never for anything because there are a lot of new characters that get introduced and we’ve broadened the universe for this movie. And again, I’m very used to seeing that world continue to open up from the Toy Story movies… so I’ve learned to just say, to my knowledge, I think everything that was born of the first movie is wrapped up. But we’ll see.”

Stanton continues, “With any of the other sequels, we strive to try and make it seem like it was inevitable, like it was meant to be, that all these extended stories and journeys with these characters were part of the whole canon. And that’s really hard, but it’s so satisfying for me when I’m experiencing that, whether it’s a great second season of a TV show or another book in a series. It’s a small club when it’s done successfully. Regardless of how much people may vocalize that they don’t enjoy or wish that there weren’t extensions, sometimes it’s really nice to go back and spend more time with these characters if they evolve, if they grow, if they expand. So that, I’m very happy with. I feel like it was just as hard, if not harder, on [Finding Dory] to get it to feel inevitable and preordained, and that it was always of the larger piece.”  Well    Well    At    Some    Point    We   Will   A    THIRD  ONE
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