or Lee Unkrich, co-directing the Disney/Pixar animated film Finding Nemo is all about making the type of film he'd want to see. The fact that Nemo is the latest in a string of great original animated films from Pixar is just a bonus. Finding Nemo, which features the voices of Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Geoffrey Rush, John Ratzenberger, Brad Garrett, Allison Janney, Barry Humphries and Alexander Gould, opens in theaters on May 30.
Unkrich has worked on Toy Story, Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life and Monsters, Inc. These Pixar films, which have been embraced by children and adults alike, have been instrumental in revitalizing animation
at the American box office.
Unkrich graduated from the University of Southern California and worked for several years in television as an editor and director. He joined Pixar in 1994 and worked as a film editor on Toy Story and A Bug's Life. He went on to co-direct Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. Unkrich co-directed Finding Nemo with writer Andrew Stanton. Unkrich will also co-direct the 2005 Disney/Pixar release Cars.
Unkrich chatted with Science Fiction Weekly about the state of animation, adults and how he thinks Finding Nemo stacks up against the other Pixar films.
I've been looking at some of the stills. They just look incredible.
Unkrich: Well, when you see them moving, it's even more incredible.
Tell me about Finding Nemo.
Unkrich: Well, it's a film we're very excited about. It's a father-and-son story that takes place underwater in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and it's basically about a fish named Marlin, a little clownfish, who's a single parent, a single father raising his little boy, Nemo. He's very, very over-protective. One day, Nemo gets taken away by a scuba diver, out on the reef, and the film's basically about Marlin's quest to get his son back against all odds. I say "against all odds," because we find out that Nemo ends up being plunked into a fish tank in a dentist's office in Sydney.
I hear you have a vegetarian shark in your story.
Unkrich: A vegetarian shark, yes. They try their best to remain vegetarian, anyway.
It would seem to go against the nature.
Unkrich: But that's what's fun!
It sounds like a wonderful story.
Unkrich: It is fun. I didn't mention that Marlin, the father, is played by Albert Brooks. He's an actor that we've wanted to work with for years. He and Ellen DeGeneres (who voiced a fish named Dory) have just made the film really, really fun to watch. Just a great partnership.
You have an amazing cast voicing the characters.
Unkrich: They're all great. And you know, a few of those names you'll notice have actually shown up in a few of our films. Brad Garrett [Everybody Loves Raymond] was also in A Bug's Life, and John Ratzenberger [Cheers], of course, has been in all of our films. Every single one of them.
He's great. You may have to keep using him in all your movies.
Unkrich: Well, you know, it's true. He's been in every one so far, so we're pretty much committed to using him in everything we make from here on out. I know he's happy to be part of our family.
He has such a unique voice.
Unkrich: Yeah, he's got a great voice, and he's a really gifted comic actor. He's really great at improvising.
If you look at Pixar's series of animated films, adult characters are usually the main focus.
Unkrich: Right. [But we had Boo in Monsters, Inc.] And we had Andy, but he is kind of a peripheral character. He's there in spirit throughout the films, but he doesn't have a lot of screen time.
Andy?
Unkrich: I'm talking about the Toy Story movies. We do have the kid Andy.
Oh, right, I didn't remember the name.
Unkrich: Sorry, it's only my life! He's there in spirit in the films, but he doesn't have a lot of screen time. But Nemo does have quite a bit of screen time in Finding Nemo. You know, it's a challenge to work with kids, but it's also really rewarding.
All these films you've made have an appeal for adults as well as children. Do you believe Finding Nemo will have that same kind of across-the-board appeal?
Unkrich: Absolutely. We're really just trying to make movies that we want to see ourselves. Nemo absolutely will appeal to everybody, just as much as the other films, if not more so. The film is incredibly cute, number one. The characters are just incredibly appealing and just fun to spend time with.
When you read the script, what was it about this material that really appealed to you?
Unkrich: Well, Andrew Stanton, who has written all of our films, this film as well. He first pitched it to me and John Lasseter and a bunch of other folks here several years ago. I think it was right after we finished Toy Story 2. It seemed like the perfect film for us to make at Pixar.
How has animation changed since you started working with it?
Unkrich: It's been interesting, because I don't personally come from an animation background. I came from live action and went to film school at USC, so I didn't grow up steeped in the tradition of traditional animation, as some of my partners have. I remember back on the original Toy Story, when we were doing press, there was a lot of talk about whether computer graphics was going replace traditional hand-drawn animation, and our attitude back then was absolutely not, it will never happen. We just saw ourselves as being another palette to be used by artists and that each art form had its own unique qualities and there was room for both to co-exist.
But now that eight years has passed since the original Toy Story, we definitely have seen a tidal shift toward more and more computer animation. And the reason that that's happened is kind of unfortunate. I really still don't think it has anything to do inherently with the medium or the look. I think it's that there have proportionally been a number of box-office disappointments that were 2-D animation. And stories that really weren't as good as they should have been coming from multiple studios. And at the same time that was happening we were making our films, which were doing really, really well and were really well received, and Dreamworks made Shrek, which was very well received. So you look and see these films that are big and popular are all computer-generated, and a bunch of other films that are seen as relative disappointments were hand-drawn, it's easy to see why the tides have changed so heavily toward computer graphics.
It's not because they were hand-drawn.
Unkrich: No, not at all. But the public starts to get a perception that CG is somehow good and hand-drawn is old-fashioned. And I honestly think that all it's going to take are a few major CG films to not do well, and then a few hand-drawn films, which are still going to be made, to do well. Even like Lilo & Stitch did pretty well at the box office, and a lot of people really loved that film. So that kind of helps shore things up a bit for hand-drawn animation. It will be interesting to see. Animation has always been a very cyclical industry, and it wouldn't surprise me in a few years to see hand-drawn animation make a big resurgence.
At Pixar, obviously, this is what we're always going to do, because this is what we do in our company, but there's room for everybody, and we don't want the industry to become homogenized and all the films to start to look the same.
The thing I would like to see changed is that in the United States, animation somehow in the past few decades has been relegated more and more to being something for children, and that's kind of unique. If you go outside of the U.S., you find that that's not the case at all, especially in Japan. Japan animation is really seen as being equal in stature. To the point of Hayao Miyazaki's film, Spirited Away, which won an Oscar this year, is the number-one film of all time in Japan. Period. When I was over doing press for Monsters, Inc. I would bring up this fact and it would really surprise a lot of the journalists, because it's just not that way over there.
We end up finding ourselves oftentimes having to defend our work as being something that is for more than just kids. It's gets kind of tiring after a while because again, we're not making these movies for kids, but we have to overcome that societal impression in the U.S. that it is for kids. I bump into more adults who have not seen our movies than have. As big as our films have been, and as many people who tell me, "Oh, I love your films. They're the only movies that my kids want to watch that I want to sit and watch with them over and over"—even though I hear a lot of that, but I still bump into more people who haven't seen them than have, and it continues to surprise me.
Your team has really set a high standard for animation. How do you think Finding Nemo stacks up to your other films?
Unkrich: I know. It's a huge amount of pressure, and you would think it would become debilitating to have that much pressure. There is the pressure, and we have been blessed that our films have done better and better, each one out of the gate is just incredible and exceeds our expectations. But we can't let that debilitate us. We have to just take each film one at a time and try to make the best film that we can. And while we know that pressure's hanging out there, that there's a lot of anticipation for our films, we can't allow that to make us second-guess the decisions that we're making. And each one is just as hard to make as the last one, because we are trying to make it so great. So, now that Finding Nemo is done, we're supremely confident in it. We had test screenings with some recruited audience of kids and adults, and the film did better at those test screenings than any of our films have ever done at test screenings. So that really bolstered our confidence and helped show us that I think we have another great film on our hands.
Looking back at this series of films, what Pixar has managed to do is come up with great characters in each movie, and I think that is why they've done so well. These are unique characters who feel real.
Unkrich: They do. They have issues that kids can relate to, and they have issues that adults can relate to. That's why it works for them. We've found if you can create interesting, compelling characters and put them in a believable situation, a believable setting, then you've done most of the work right there.
Are you worried about competition from the other big movies this summer?
Unkrich: We actually have a good little pocket that we're coming out in. We're coming out a couple weeks after The Matrix [Reloaded[ movie and we're kind of free and clear for a couple weeks. So we're very happy with our release date, and we think we're going to do well and fit in well with the other films around us this summer.
We really think this film is great, and just because there may be another film out there that's also great, I don't think that's going to preclude anybody from seeing this one too. We have enough of a track record that people expect our films to be great, and we won't disappoint them.
You started out film editing. Have things changed for you a lot on these films?
Unkrich: I wouldn't say they changed a lot. It was really a natural progression, because we were a small enough team on the earlier films that we ended up wearing a lot of hats, and I think it's just basically become a bit more official on the later films. But my role here has really remained pretty steady through all the films, just being kind of a core part of the creative team making the films.
It sounds like a terrific environment to work in.
Unkrich: Yeah, it really is. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. I feel very lucky to be here.
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The cast and crew of Enterprise
