How Do You Teach A Fish To Act?
One of the film’s biggest challenges was learning how to turn a fish into an entertaining actor. Brown says this was difficult to figure out, as Pixar’s past features starred characters with two legs and two arms. To turn fish into good actors, Brown adds, “We had to develop a whole new bag of tricks. They were built on the same fundamentals of animation, communication, etc., but now we were dealing with fish that had no arms or legs. I know how to make a human walk sadly or happily, but how do you make a fish swim happily or sadly? Figuring all that stuff out was a definite challenge.

“We started from reality and went from there. Part of it was learning how to make gestures with fins. If I’m underwater and I move my hands up, my body is going to move back. If our fish are gesturing all over the place, do we want to have their bodies move all over the place too? Probably not. We needed to find the right balance of getting the fish to make the right acting gestures without having the gestures throw you out of the realm of the aquatic world we were creating.”

Walt Disney studied deer closely before embarking on Bambi in 1938. © Disney. All rights reserved.

They spent a lot of time studying Bambi (1942), as it didn’t use a lot of anthropomorphic animals. Disney really stayed true to nature. Pixar knew they didn’t want to make human-like fish that stand on their tails like the star of The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964).

To get fish to act, Pixar had to take liberties. In Finding Nemo the face becomes very expressive. They humanized the faces in the characterization process. There is lip synch. Brown says, “We have more of a human face on a fish. A fish’s face isn’t that compelling. A real fish doesn’t have flexible lips, just a hard membrane.”

The bodies of the fish are more realistic. “A fish is really just a head with a tube thing stuck on to the back of it," according to Brown. “That’s your main silhouette and communication piece.” To maintain the look they wanted, they decided they didn’t really need to use a lot of body gestures. When they did need to use fins like arms to convey emphasis, they tried to find moments when there was a motivation for movement so the gesture would be part of a physical act. It would become a body accent and not an out of place movement.

One of the great moments of the finished film for Brown is the sequence they call “Goodbye Dory.” It really tested the animators’ ability to make fish act as it is an emotional charged scene in which the new friends part. He said, “You animate to the voices, and the reads we got from Albert Brooks and Ellen DeGeneres were absolutely on the money. Three people, Gini Santos, Dave DeVan and Mark Walsh worked on it. It was a pivotal scene… such sweet and sincere animation. It shows what we can do when we have impeccable writing, reads and just fantastic animation."

The writing, acting and animation all came together for an emotionally charged scene when Dory and Marlin say goodbye. Ellen DeGeneres (with director Andrew Stanton) voices Dory.

Brown believes the scene is so well done that people will probably not notice the excellence of the animation and acting. He says, “One goal of the animator is to make the craft of what you have done transparent to the audience. You want them engulfed in the film, absorbed by seeing the scene, empathizing with the characters, being entertained by them or the story. You don’t want them thinking about the craft of the animators.”

More Difficult Shots
Animating about 77,000 jellyfish was quite a challenge for both the technical crew and the artists. With jellyfish nothing is static, everything moves. Water, wind and their swimming movements influenced their forms. That resulted in every frame being a different composition so it was hard to create actions and forms that matched up from shot to shot. Past Pixar features starred characters that looked the same from shot to shot and their movements and appearances were easy to match up. Now they had to deal with ever-changing forms.