June 8 - Finding Dory

Image copyright Disney

On this day, in 2016, Pixar's seventeenth animated feature, Finding Dory, had its world debut at the El Capitan Theater in Los Angeles, California. When Finding Nemo burst onto movie screens in 2003, it became a heartfelt classic that grossed nearly $900 million. Creating some sort of sequel was an obvious choice to make. Unfortunately, since Disney and Pixar were separate companies at that point, Disney decided to create a new studio to crank out sequels to Pixar films (which, under the agreement they had with Pixar, they were allowed to do). Circle 7 Animation was the name of that studio and, thankfully, nothing they ever began to create actually went into production. In 2006, Disney bought Pixar and they were allowed to take care of their own sequels while Circle 7 quietly disappeared. Why didn't Pixar ever use a single script or idea that Circle 7 wrote? A short synopsis of their proposed Nemo sequel tells us all we need to know. Remy, a long lost twin of Nemo, is found (where he come from since Nemo centers around the fact that only one egg survived, who knows). Then Marlin gets captured (even though he managed to travel thousands of miles through all sorts of perilous situations without getting captured in the first one, never mind the fact that everyone learned plenty of techniques to thwart being captured) and it's up to Remy, Nemo and Dory to rescue him. Ugh. We all really dodged a whole barrage of bullets with that acquisition.

Image copyright Disney

As the years went on, Ellen Degeneres, the voice of Dory, began campaigning on her talk show for a chance to play the forgetful blue tang again. Disney was obviously interested in as many sequels as they could squeeze out of any product. Andrew Stanton, the writer and director of Nemo (as well as a big wig at Pixar) only wanted to do sequels if they made sense creatively not just as a crappy cash grab, and resisted. It wasn't until Nemo was being prepared for a 10th anniversary re-release, that Andrew watched it again for pretty much the first time in a decade. Elements of Dory's character began coming together in his mind for a potential new story. He didn't say anything about his ideas to anyone until he'd spent some time with it, got a story he thought might hold up and then pitched it to John Lasseter in early 2012, who loved it. He then sat down with Victoria Strouse and hammered out a full script before revealing it to Ellen and Albert Brooks, the voice of Marlin, both of whom enthusiastically jumped on board.

Finding Dory opened in general release nine days after its premier and became a juggernaut. During its theatrical run, Dory racked up several box office milestones including the biggest opening weekend of an animated film in North America, the highest North American overall gross of an animated film and the second Pixar film to cross the $1 billion mark. Dory won several Kid's Choice Awards, People's Choice Awards and a Saturn Award among nominations for all sorts of other awards, but was edged out of the year's nominations for a Best Animated Feature Oscar by two other Disney films that came out the same year, Zootopia (which won) and Moana. Another Pixar sequel that took over a decade to appear (I'm looking at you Incredibles 2), Finding Dory turned out to be a sequel we didn't know we needed, but are glad we received (especially considering the alternative).