Pixar's crowning achievement in Finding Nemo is how well they captured the light and movement of the water onscreen. Unless otherwise noted, all images © Disney Enterprises Inc./Pixar Animation Studios. All rights reserved.

At first glance, Finding Nemo’s breathtakingly beautiful underwater computer-animation looks almost photo-real. Almost. "The animals are caricatures of sea creatures," explains supervising animator Dylan Brown. "I can see how people can look at our water and say it is photo-realistic, but it is actually caricatured as well.”

The perception that Finding Nemo was intended to be photo-realistic is based on something that happened when Pixar Animation Studios was developing the project. “One of the things we did early on was a series of photo-realistic tests," Brown adds. "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. You have the caustic lighting coming down that dances all over the ocean’s floor. You have light beams, and you have surface images. They designed all of the individual elements using the software that was on hand. They did tests using four ocean scenes, two above water and two underwater, to see if they could recreate real footage of the sea. The technical crew worked on it and eventually came back and showed us their work. We couldn't tell the difference between the re-created footage and the original. It blew us all away.

The animators at Pixar had to develop a new vocabulary to describe the various qualities of the ocean they wanted to animate.

"We knew we could make a Jacques Cousteau-type of documentary, but that's not what we were trying to do. What we do at the studio is caricature and it would look funny to have cartoony caricatures of fish in this realistic world. We didn't want to fool the audience that they are in a real world. You have to believe you are underwater, but it doesn't have to be photo-realistic to do that.”

Although Brown calls their backgrounds believable-looking virtual sets, he maintains that they created a fantasy world predicated on the studio's trademark hyper-realism. They dressed their sets with wonderful forms made of coral and other materials. They use carefully controlled lighting and colors. Lighting is often more pronounced and colors are often richer in the film than they are in the ocean. For example, a pale blue might become rich royal blue in the film. In the real world things become gray and difficult to see as they get farther away from you when you are underwater, but in the film their water remains saturated with color.

Understanding Water
One of the trickiest problems for Pixar’s staff was learning to communicate to each other about actions, textures and other details that are not easy to describe in the English language. A new vocabulary had to be developed in order to communicate, and technical director Oren Jacob believes they never really mastered a vocabulary that describes all the nuances of how the water should look.