The Ocean Life in Finding Nemo

At first glance, Finding Nemo's underwater animation looks photorealistic. This is because the team of animators intended for it to come off this way while developing the project. "One of the things we did early on was a series of photo-realistic tests. Our technical team figured out what elements are needed to create photo-realistic water. You have a murk that is like a fog underwater. You have particulate matter that is like little bits of dust floating around the water." The team used four different ocean scenes, two underwater and two above water to see if they could re-create real footage of the sea. At some point the technical crew showed the supervising animator, Dylan Brown, their work and he couldn't tell the difference between the original footage and the re-created footage.

Although the backgrounds looked virtually believable, the studio aimed to create a world based on their trademark hyper-realistic style. An example is that in the real ocean things become gray and difficult to see as they get further away, but in the film the water remains saturated with the deep blue color. The team of animators even traveled to Hawaii in order to study the movement of the water to get it right.

Animating fish was another story. Brown said he and seven other crew members spent the day at an aquarium watching the fish and learning how they move. They also had a ichthyologist teach them why fish move the way that they do. The blue tang, the type of fish that Dory is, move in an up down motion and rarely use their tales. Then the issue of making fish act came after. The team spent a lot of time working on how movement would look with fins. According to Brown, the fish didn't need a lot of body gestures but instead found ways for the movements to become a body accent.

I watched this movie a million times when I was a kid and it's fascinating to go back now and watch it and think more thoroughly about the process of the animators.