“I remember speaking with character designer Ricky Nierva about a fish character and he asked, ‘Where would the eyebrows really be?’ I told him fish don’t have eyebrows. They don’t have any muscles in their face except for jaw closers. Ricky said, ‘Adam, fish don’t talk but talking is going to be a requirement for the movie. So we’re going to have to be taking artistic license with science all the time.’”
Summers also gave the character designers and animators some important insights into fish locomotion by explaining the difference between flappers and rowers. Clown fish are rowers who tend to propel themselves by moving their pectoral fins in a horizontal motion. At higher speeds they wiggle their entire body. Blue tangs, like Dory, are flappers, who flap their fins up and down to move and almost never wiggle their entire body. The result was that Father’s movements were more fluid and graceful, while Dory tended to flit sharply about.”
Summers adds, “In most animated films with fish, the characters move back and forth with no visible propulsive device and that really offends the eye. You don’t need to be an ichthyologist to know there’s something wrong with that kind of locomotion. It’d be like watching a horse trot with two of its legs still. In ‘Nemo’ if a fish is moving, its fins are moving. There’s a sort of kinetic feel to the characters that tells you they’re underwater. They’re not acting in air. When they flap around, it has consequences for their whole bodies. They did a heck of a job making clear the differences between living in an incompressible fluid like water and compressible fluid like air. I was completely knocked out. This was an amazing group to work with and we had a lot of fun in the process.”
The starting point for any good animated performance is the vocal talent, and with “Finding Nemo,” the filmmakers had some of the very best.
According to Andrew Stanton, “With Albert Brooks you get more than a voice, you get an established persona. He always knows how to maximize the entertainment value of any moment. Even when his character wasn’t asked to be funny in a scene, he knew exactly how to play it for entertainment. At the recording sessions, he would bring his own sensibilities to the material and just kind of run with it. We learned to just start the tape rolling and give it a tail slate at the end. We didn’t want to interrupt his creative flow. He would just get these ideas and go again and again. He’s such a hard worker and very eager to please.
“Ellen DeGeneres was someone I wanted for the role from the start,” adds Stanton. “Even before the character was named Dory, I knew I needed someone to help Father find his son. In the middle of thinking about this character one evening, my wife was watching the “Ellen” show on TV and subconsciously I could hear her doing her schtick of changing her mind five times before a sentence finishes. Usually I don’t like to trap myself into writing specifically to a character, but this seemed like such a good match that I decided to go with my gut and hope the planets would align. I called Ellen up to see if she might be interested and I basically told her that I had written the part for her and that I’d be in trouble if she didn’t take it. She was so nice and she said, ‘Well then I’d better take it.’ She brought a real kindness and gentleness to the part, along with the rhythm and the quirkiness. Both she and Albert have a way of saying things that are unique to them.
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