The Color Palette For "Finding Nemo"

Finding Nemo is a film about a father’s quest to find his son, and how he meets a series of characters along the way who help him overcome his fears. A logline for the film might be:

Logline: Finding Nemo

Marlin, a timid clownfish who has developed an extraordinary fear of adventure and the open sea after his wife (Coral) and nearly all of their children are eaten by a vicious barracuda, is forced to overcome his fears when his remaining son, Nemo, is taken by a scuba diver who is collecting fish to be pets for a dentist in Sydney, Australia. As he frantically goes on a search to find his son, Marlin is joined by a sprightly, memory-challenged tang fish named Dory in an epic adventure—confronting sharks, humans, and old torpedoes on his way to rescuing his son and finding his rightful place as a confident fish and supportive father.

What we learn from this logline is that we are going to be concerned with the father’s arc in this film. The movie isn’t about the son, Nemo, but about the act of finding him. This sets up the overall shape of the film: The ocean is presented as a beautiful, enchanted place that evolves, during the horrifying prologue, into a scary, ominous place for Marlin. It is only his fears that prevent him from seeing the beauty of the reef where he lives with Nemo. In fact, it is the outside world of humans who present the real danger to his way of life.

With this analysis, it was essential to create a world in which the reef is a beautiful, brightly colored environment, in contrast to the world that is going to take Nemo away from Marlin. By showing this change, the filmmakers can help the audience to feel the conflict that Marlin is feeling.

This contrast is perfectly illustrated in the scene in which Nemo, at his first day of school, is captured by a scuba diver collecting fish for pets. Marlin is forced to chase the escaping boat, hopping in and out of the water, until he ventures farther from the reef than he has ever allowed himself to go.

The analysis for this scene is:

Scene Analysis: Nemo Abduction Scene in Finding Nemo

After Nemo and his new classmates and friends have ridden on their teacher’s, Mr. Ray’s, back to a science expedition on his first day of school, Marlin horrifyingly discovers that they are going to visit the Dropoff, the area where Coral was killed. Petrified, he races out to the area to call Nemo back home, but he is so demandingly protective that his son rebels and swims farther out towards a boat, where he is captured by a scuba diver. Marlin, without thinking about his fear of the depths, follows the departing boat on a frantic chase into the darkest, strangest areas of the ocean until he finally loses the boat and his son. There he meets Dory, who at first raises Marlin’s spirits when she promises to help him. Then her short-term memory fails and Marlin is left to start a rescue attempt with nothing but his wits, his fears, and a loyal but useless Dory to help him.

In order to move forward, let’s ask the same questions that we always ask in our search for LEAN FORWARD MOMENTS.

• Whose scene is this?
• How does this character feel at the start of the scene?
• How does he/she feel at the end of the scene?
• Where does that change occur?

It is clear, despite the scene beginning with Nemo on his new adventure, that the scene is about Marlin: He is, after all, the focus of our logline and the sequence ends with his dilemma.

Marlin begins the scene watching his son go off on his first day of school. He has a lot of misgivings and fear about Nemo’s new adventure, even though they are surrounded by their vibrant and happy home on the reef. Marlin ends the scene determined to find his lost son, despite the fact that it will take him away from the reef and into unknown territory. He has moved from safety, even with his fear, into a much scarier world, and the focus on his mission allows him to ignore what should be a far more frightening world. In other words, Marlin has moved from safety into danger, but he has also begun his journey from fear to self-assurance.

That first LEAN FORWARD MOMENT happens when Marlin forbids Nemo from going out to the boat and participating in school. Nemo tells his father that he hates him, shocking his father, and swims out to the boat anyway, directly challenging him. The second LEANFORWARD MOMENT happens after the chase, when Marlin eventually loses sight of the boat (and Nemo) and finds himself in the deep waters.

How does the production design, along with the other facets of the production, help the audience to feel those LEAN FORWARD MOMENTS?

Pixar Animation, which produced Finding Nemo, has a very specific process for the development of both the script and its animation. They develop a series of color scripts, which are essentially colored drawings that encapsulate the feeling of each scene—the varying color palettes that will help to tell the story.

Production designer William Eggleston explains how the team approached defining the fanciful nature of the reef: “The coral reef is so beautiful but there’s so much there, and we had to find a way of organizing it, or paring it down, and choosing". The color script for the scene depicts the reef area as colorful and joyous.

The color scripts give the enormous production team a sense of the spirit of the film in this reef location. It shows how the colors of the film will help the audience to see how Marlin’s fears are based on something very personal and are somewhat overblown. This is a beautiful, inviting world, the production design is saying. Marlin’s fears must be irrational.

This color script, as Mr. Ray takes Nemo and the class on a field trip, gives a sense of the beauty of the reef area and the bright blue of the water.

In the documentary accompanying the film’s DVD release, there is a video of the crew videotaping a scuba dive for research. It is interesting to see that, as the camera jumps off the side of a boat and submerges, the color palette of the underwater world gets darker and dimmer with fewer colorful details. Yet that was clearly against the feeling that the collaborators needed in order to tell the story—they wanted it to look more detailed and more inviting, as you can see in a frame from the final film. The world that Nemo experiences, as he rides off on his field trip, is vibrant and exciting.

Notice that, although there is an increased amount of detail and brightness in the final image, the spirit of the color script is still there—the world is a bright and beautiful place. The color scripts, which had been created some two years before this final frame, clearly gave the filmmakers a great visual description of what the film really needed at its start.

Eggleston describes how the crew needed to choose a variety of color palettes for the water alone. You can see how the team used a very clear and light blue for the water in this part of the film. And, despite this happy treatment of the water and its surrounding colors, there is the contrasting point being made in that Marlin is still fearful of it. As production designer William Eggleston says:

• "What we decided to do was to establish a range of underwater color to track the characters through the film. So with the reef, we start with crystal clear, very light greenish-turquoise, and as the film progresses it gets darker and turquoise, and then black and then blue. And then as we get closer to Sydney Harbor, it becomes greener."

This means that the color palette needed to change in order to accentuate the LEANFORWARD MOMENTS of the scene.

The first moment occurs at the Dropoff area, after Nemo and his new friends see a boat floating on the top of the water. At that moment, Marlin shows up and wrongly accuses his son of wanting to swim out to the boat. In front of Nemo’s new friends, Marlin orders his son to return home and to give up school for that year. Nemo, for the first time, stands up to his father and tells him “I hate you.” He then swims out to the boat and is quickly captured by the scuba diver. This begins a chase sequence, as Marlin tries to catch up to the boat and rescue Nemo, jumping in and out of the water.

The color palette of the ocean begins to change at this point. Instead of Marlin being a bright orange color in the midst of a large number of other bright colors in the frame, he becomes surrounded by much darker hues. At times he is the only brightness in the frame. As we pass the first Lean Forward Moment, Marlin becomes the only bright color in the middle of the forbidding ocean. Notice the change in the color of the water.

Also, the colors that surround him when Marlin is above the water line are always much more muted than the ones back on the reef. So, as the scared little fish ventures out into the waters, preparing to face his fears, the colors around him will have to change. As Marlin ventures out into the darker unknown ocean, the color palette (as shown in this color script) changes so that he is the brightest spot in the frame.

The color palette changes again later in the film, as Marlin arrives in Sydney and is much closer to saving Nemo. But at this point in the film, when he has just lost his son, the world that he is forced to move into is much more dangerous than the one he has left behind. It is no coincidence that the collaborative team’s choice of color palette here, as Marlin begins his journey towards overcoming his fears, is very different than the one before this LEAN FORWARD MOMENT, when he lived on the reef, consumed by his fears.

The way in which the color palette of the frame changes around Marlin helps to give the audience an underlying emotional sense that things are changing with him. And that happens right around the scene’s LEAN FORWARD MOMENTS.

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