Oscar-winning director Andrew Stanton on making the sequel of Finding Nemo

Director Andrew Stanton is on his way to find the forgetful Dory, 13 years after he found the wildly-popular clown fish, Nemo.

Director Andrew Stanton is on his way to find the forgetful Dory, 13 years after he found the wildly-popular clown fish, Nemo. The sequel of Finding Nemo (2003), Finding Dory revolves around the blue tang fish and her journey to find her family. The 50-year-old Academy Award winner, who last directed the live-action film John Carter (2012), said that he’d felt Finding Nemo was incomplete after he saw the film again when Disney released it in 3D. Stanton tells us about his experience working with the cast again and working with Ellen DeGeneres.

What was it like to work with the cast again?

When we started recording in 2012, it felt like we’d picked up where we left off. It’s a bit of a reunion. You already know how you work together and that’s enjoyable.

We’ve seen a lot of Hank (Ed O’Neill, the octopus) in the promos. How is he?

Hank is very solitary and uncooperative, but he has a heart of gold. I think he is very frustrated by this. Dory senses it and she kind of brings him out of his shell.

How is it working with Ellen DeGeneres?

She makes things that you think are not meant to be funny, funny! She’ll give even a ‘How is it going?’ her own flavor and suddenly it is the most charming thing in the world.

Five things to know

•   To get the story right, the team did a lot of brainstorming. It took about 1,03,000 storyboards over a period of three and a half years before they got the final blueprint.
• Alexander Gould, the original voice of Nemo, has been replaced by seventh grader Hayden Rolence in this movie. Twenty two-year-old Gould’s voice was deemed no longer suitable for the tiny clown fish. However, we can still get to hear him in his cameo as Passenger Carl.
• Dory is the most-liked Disney/Pixar character, with more than 25 million likes on Facebook.
• Hank was the most challenging character to animate because an octopus has no bones. Generally it takes around six months to animate the first shot of a character, but for this movie, it took two years to animate Hank’s first shot.
• After 2013’s controversial documentary, Blackfish (on a captive killer whale), Finding Dory’s makers changed the venue of several of their scenes—from a sea-park to the Marine Life Institute. The latter is an aquarium where Dory meets Hank.