ALL AT sea
Director Andrew Stanton charts new waters.
Finding Dory Starring Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks, Idris Elba, Diane Keaton Directors Andrew Stanton, Angus MacLane (co-director) ETA 29 July
Few Pixar films are so revered as director Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo, the first of the studio’s movies to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The tale of an overprotective clownfish who journeys across the ocean in search of his lost son, Nemo was the second highest grossing film of 2003 and remains, to this day, the best-selling DVD of all time. Stanton – who went on to direct Pixar’s WALL·E and Disney’s live-action
John Carter – never planned to make a sequel. Yet revisiting his big-screen debut years after its release, he found himself preoccupied with one question: what happened to Dory’s parents?
As voiced by comedian Ellen DeGeneres, the regal blue tang with short-term memory issues was
Nemo’s breakout character. And audiences will be relieved to hear that, after helping Marlin find his son, she too now has a chance to reunite with her family in Finding Dory, a sequel that Stanton calls “a perfect compliment” to its predecessor.
The filmmaker sits down to chat with Total Film in a hotel across the street from the famed Monterey Bay Aquarium (where, as the “Monterey Marine Life Institute,” much of Dory takes place). “There’s a structure to the storytelling of Finding Dory,” he says, “that ended up being somewhat the inverse of the structure of the telling of the first one. So in a weird way they feel complimentary as opposed to a copy of each other. Which was very comforting. It kind of meant that there was a natural, organic extension to it. Which is what you want. You want it to feel like it’s its own thing. It’s like if you and your spouse have another kid. It’s not exactly the same kid, but it’s from the same parents.”
Stanton’s new baby finds Albert Brooks and Willem Dafoe also returning to their roles of Marlin and Gill, and Stanton himself reprises everyone’s favourite sea turtle, Crush. They’re joined this time around by Hayden Rolence as Nemo, It’s Always
Sunny In Philadelphia’s Kaitlin Olson as a whale shark named Destiny, and Modern Family’s Ty Burrell and Ed O’Neill as, respectively, a beluga whale named Bailey and a cranky seven-armed octopus (or “septipus”) named Hank, who serves as Dory’s sidekick in her quest.
Regarding the seismic jump in Pixar’s rendering technology between the two films, producer Lindsey Collins, also a veteran of Nemo, remarks, “Hopefully what audiences will feel like is they are just back in the world of Nemo, but it will feel that there’s a richness to it and a freedom to it. It’s less restrictive in terms of what we can and can’t do.”
“Story dictates the environment,” explains Stanton. “It’s not told from a spectacle point of view. You can feel when movies are made for those reasons, and they’re very flat and false. I just wanted to say, ‘Where has a small fish gone that we haven’t?’ I’m hoping you’re gonna [ see] that from the beginning of the movie to the end.”