Disney/Pixar Find Follow-Up Succe with Finding Dory

In Disney/Pixar's 2003 animated feature, the popular Finding Nemo, a forgetful blue tang fish named Dory helped reunite the clownfish Marlin with his son Nemo. Now, upbeat, perky Dory has her own movie titled Finding Dory.

But wait. Dory has no short-term memory. How would anyone know if she were lost, not the least Dory herself? If she were lost, how could she find her way back? And, would she want to?

Dory was not wired up to be a main character, says Finding Dory director and writer Andrew Stanton. Self-reflection is the reason you can follow why a character grows. But, we gave her short-term memory loss. She has emotional memory, but she can't track progress. So, how do you give her the opportunity of self-reflection when she can't do it herself? I would never recommend this to a writer.

Stanton, however, had an advantage over other writers who might try. He wrote and directed Finding Nemo, receiving an Oscar nomination for writing and a Best Animated Feature Oscar for directing the film. In addition, he has received an Oscar for directing Wall-E, and Oscar nominations for writing Toy Story, Wall-E and Toy Story 3. Thus, he knew the characters in Finding Nemo better than anyone else, and he knows how to move characters from one film into another. But, why did he choose such an unlikely main character?

I saw Dory as a tragic character, Stanton says. I knew her backstory. She used optimism, charm and selflessness to make sure people wouldn't ditch her. It was her protection. This story is about Dory finding herself - in every way. I felt she deserved to like who she is.

Ellen DeGeneres was Stanton's choice to voice Dory in Finding Nemo, and she returned for this film.

Ellen is the only person I ever wrote for specifically, Stanton says. Thank goodness she said, yes.'

Also returning is Albert Brooks as Nemo's father, Marlin. Stepping in to fill Nemo's fin in Finding Dory is 12-year-old actor Hayden Rolence.

A crew that topped 400 in all, but averaged 280 on a day-to-day basis, worked on the film. Of those, nearly 100 in the art, story and editorial departments spent more than two years creating the story, designing the world, and developing the new characters. Storyboarding alone extended over two and a half years, resulting in 103,639 storyboards. Helping Stanton, who is also a vice president at Pixar, was co-director Angus MacLane.

The first sequences moved into production approximately a year before the June 17, 2016, release date. Many of the technical challenges for the production crew centered on an octopus's special needs, on compositing water simulations and on new tools for working with Pixar RenderMan RIS.

A LITTLE HELP FROM HER FRIENDS

The story begins in the colorful, cozy coral reef where Dory, Marlin and Nemo have made a home. It's a happy family time until a massive stingray migration swims through the neighborhood and triggers deep memories in Dory of a family she thinks she might have left behind.

While Dory forgets details in her day-to-day life, her emotional memory is fine, says producer Lindsay Collins.

Determined to uncover her past, Dory talks Marlin and Nemo into helping her find her long-lost family. The search sends the three fish back across the ocean to a Marine Life Institute (MLI), a rescue rehabilitation center and aquarium loosely based on California's Monterey Bay Aquarium, and into a kelp forest nearby.

At MLI, Dory meets the other three stars of this film: a beluga whale with faulty sonar skills named Bailey, a clumsy nearsighted whale shark named Destiny and a seven-legged octopus named Hank.

I saw a beluga whale in Vancouver and couldn't keep my eyes off it, Stanton says. The animator in me wanted to see what kind of character that species would be.

Character designer Jason Deamer created the caricatured whale.

He's like a giant pork bun, Deamer says. I looked at pork buns for reference, for the texture of his skin. It's soft, with ripples.

For Destiny, Deamer picked an even more unusual reference.

She was weirdly difficult to design, he says. I pitched the idea of thinking of her as an oven mitt with big mouth shapes. But we painted her like the real thing.

Bailey is gray. Destiny has evenly spaced dots on her tail, a more chaotic pattern on her middle section, with increasingly dense dots moving forward to her head.

As for Hank, he was the most challenging of the three new characters for Deamer, the technical directors, and the animators. But, arguably, the most helpful to Dory.

We had to move Dory across the Marine Life Institute, Stanton says. So one reason we thought of Hank was because he's so ambulatory, and octopuses are known for being good escape artists. In one scene, for example, Hank grabs a ride on a visitor's back, camouflaged as a backpack.

HANK

Hank is my favorite character in the movie, and he was one of the hardest things we've done on a character level, Deamer says. We wanted him to be a lovable, grumpy, old octopus. But what makes an octopus look old? We struggled so hard to make him appealing. These things are slimy and gross. They're super intelligent, but that sideways eye thing doesn't make you think of motherly love. And where do we put his mouth? We ended up tucking it under his tentacles.

For Hank's color, red was the obvious choice.

Hank is red because we thought if an animal could change color, he'd choose orangey red, Deamer says. And, it contrasts with Dory's blue.

But Hank also changes color. And patterns. And shape. He's a cat on a wall poster, a camouflage backpack, even a potted plant. To create those textures and colors, the team wanted to mimic how these changes happen in the real world.

We wanted it to look natural and not like a cross-fade, sa

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