Pixar directors reveal Finding Dory animation secrets

Arriving on these shores after a record-smashing opening in the US, Finding Dory is Pixar’s much anticipated follow-up to their 2003 hit Finding Nemo.

Set one year later, it picks up the tale of Dory (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres), the blue tang fish with a 10-second memory, who helped reunite Nemo with his father at the end of the first movie. Wondering about her own parents, from whom she was separated as a baby, she now sets out to search for them – with her best friends Nemo and Marlin for company.

“I was done with fish. I’m never coming back to the ocean,” remembers director Andrew Stanton. After Finding Nemo, he preferred to abandon the deep in favour of new animation frontiers – such as robots and outer space. In this on-stage interview with the Pixar team, including co-director Angus MacLane and producer Lindsey Collins, Stanton explains what persuaded him that the watery world of Nemo and Dory deserved a return visit.

Making a sequel so many years later was far from simple, however. “Imagine going to your computer that you had 13 years ago and trying to reboot that software,” Stanton says. Everything had to be started from scratch.

There were also new challenges. On her journey, Dory encounters a character that the Pixar team say is the hardest they’ve ever had to animate: Hank, the octopus with only seven tentacles, voiced by Ed O’Neill.

Watch the video to find out the real reason why Hank has seven tentacles, and other revealing anecdotes about the making of this latest Pixar marvel.

Justin: It’s 13 years on, obviously, from the original film.

Andrew: Yes.

Justin: And, on paper, it must have looked, to people on the outside world, that actually you’ve got the assets there, the characters there, but a lot changes in 13 years in the world of technology. And how was it…?

Andrew: Yeah, imagine going to your computer that you had 13 years ago and trying to reboot that software and use it.

Lindsey: Doesn’t work.

Andrew: Yeah.

Justin: So, everything has to be restarted from scratch?

Andrew: Everything, even the scenes in the beginning where it seemed like we were using the old movie, all redone.

Angus: All new.

Lindsey: It was actually good. That was a good testing place for us, actually, because we wanted to make sure that we felt as though people who had seen the first film weren’t kind of thrown, that the look was so different. But we also wanted to take advantage of all the new technology, so we kind of used that as a great test case for we have this scene in the old film, we’re redoing it in this film, so how can we make sure we’re kind of keeping it in the same world?

Justin: And obviously there’s so much affection for the original characters. Was it really difficult deciding which characters would make it to Finding Dory?

Andrew: You know, you don’t get presented to it like that, in a weird way. You think you would, because that’s how you’re thinking about it from the outside. But for us, we’re just going, “Look, this is Dory’s story. What does she need? Well, we know we need Marlon and Nemo. That’s the family she’s with. Who is she looking for? It’s her old family. We know we need that.” And then as you work for the next three and a half years, the story kind of tells you what characters need to be there. I fought for a long time not to put Crush in the film, and you won.

Angus: Well, what happened was, I said I think the audience is gonna want it. And I think, because you did the voice, you were like, “Ah, it seems cheap.” But then I went to Disneyland with my family, and I had never been to the Crush ride, the turtle talk, and to see the way that…

Man: Does that exist in the Paris park?

Angus: I think it’s here. But the way that the families and kids knew all the lines of Crush, there was something about the energy of Crush, and it was totally separate from Nemo, that after I went to Disneyland, I tried to convince…I came back and I was like, “We’ve got to figure out a way to get them in there. The Crush fan base is huge.” I had no idea it was such a big…

Lindsey: They’re gonna be angry Crush fans.

Angus: They’re gonna be…you have no idea what it’s like.

Lindsey: You don’t want to make them angry.

Andrew: But even that didn’t convince me, till we realised, “We have to get across the ocean fast,” and that was thing.

Lindsey: And then you were like, “I know a guy.”

Andrew: I was like, “All right! I’ll do it.”

Justin: And you were a voice, too?

Angus: Yeah, I did a couple of… I did “Oh, watch where you’re going,” the fish. And I did, “Looks like we’re done here.”

Andrew: And I was the voice of the big mouth clam.

Justin: Lindsey, did you get a look in?

Andrew: I could answer everything today like that.

Justin: We’re gonna keep you to that.

Andrew: Okay!

Justin: Or maybe not.

Andrew: That reminds me of a story. No.

Justin: Lindsey, did you get to play voices?

Lindsey: I had done it on other films, and on this film, actually the scene where he says…

Angus: Looks like we’re done here.

Lindsey: And then I was like, “Dude, cut it out. You’re a scientist.”

Angus: Come on, it’s funny.

Lindsey: Yeah, that was actually me, but it’s not me because they had to replace me because they got mad. They were like, no.

Angus: They were a Lindsey impersonator.

Lindsey: They were like, “You can’t do that when you’re the producer.” But my daughter is the voice of baby Dory. So, that…if I was gonna pick a battle, I was like, “Well…”

Andrew: Which is the most adorable voice. We had to find…we had to work hard to make sure that the cuteness of Dory visually matched the cuteness of that voice.

Lindsey: Yeah, she was pretty cute.

Andrew: You have to live with her, we just have to record her.

Lindsey: I know, I’m like, “Yeah, she’s super cute.”

Justin: I mean, the fact that the film has taken 13 years.

Andrew: It didn’t take 13 years. We did it for three years.

Justin: What I’m saying is, I take it, therefore, it wasn’t something that you had originally planned to do. 

Andrew: Oh, no. Nobody plans that, “Oh, in 13 years, everybody’s gonna want to see this.” Actually, every film we do, it takes about three to four years, at best. And so, you’re done. I mean, you’re done with whatever. I don’t care how good the film is, like, three years, four years, that’s college. That’s high school. You’re done. So I was done with fish. I’m like, “I’m never coming back to the ocean. It’s done.” The film did really well. Let’s go do things with robots. Let’s go to Mars.

Angus: Who wants to go back to school? That guy.

Andrew: Basically, 2011, they wanted to release it in 3D, and they asked us to watch it. So we went back into the theater to watch it from…in a big theater like this, and I hadn’t done that in eight, seven years. And I think I saw it for the first time objectively like an audience member. And I walked out completely unsatisfied with Dory’s arch. I was like, “Oh my gosh, she could get lost tomorrow. She could forget Marlon and Nemo. She doesn’t know who her parents are.” I know her backstory, I know she wandered the ocean her whole life and she’s got abandonment issues. She has self acceptance issues. As a writer, I was like, “I completely dropped the ball.”

I wanted her to be at peace, basically. So it was a very personal, sort of almost parental thing that motivated me to want to go back to it after all that time.

Justin: But did you worry about the fact that Dory is such a great kind of supporting character, but to suddenly make her the focus of the film, that’s quite a different…I mean, that’s a lot of work.

Andrew: Yeah, I worried about it a little bit because we had done Monsters University, and I had seen how hard it was to make Mike Wazowski suddenly be the lead. But I knew we had conquered it and you could figure it out. But I did not expect the short term memory loss to be such a problem for a main character. This may be a little heady, but the reason you can follow a main character in a story is because they can tell you how they’re changing as they go through the movie. They can talk to somebody and say, “You know, I was scared at breakfast, but now that you’ve talked to me, I’m not scared anymore at lunch.” And she can’t do that.

Angus: She’s like, “What did I have for breakfast? I don’t remember.”

Lindsey: “Have we met?”

Angus: Which actually, I don’t remember what I had for breakfast.

Andrew: And so you had no sense. And so, for two years, we were battling. Like, she just kept seeming simplistic and not really changing, and you weren’t really investing in anything. And so, there’s a grocery list of tricks that we finally learned, that are all on the film now, for how to kind of really keep you invested and track along with her, even though she can’t remember a lot.

Justin: And how aware were you in terms of sensitivities around dealing with something like short term memory loss? Because there is a sort of wider…I mean, or did you just not allow that to…

Lindsey: Well, I think we…in a weird way, because Dory was so beloved as a character. And again, it’s almost like watching your kids after they’ve left the house, kind of what they make of themselves. And so, Dory had kind of stopped being ours for a long time, out in the general kind of public. And everybody so loved her, that I don’t think we ever…all we wanted to do was, I think, make sure that, A, we were being true to that, and that we didn’t ever make her seem silly or stupid, because that’s not the impression that anybody has of her. So we were always kind of checking that to make sure. And the good news was, because of Ellen, she brings such an intelligence, and a wit, and a street smart subtlety to it that it so kind of marries. And anytime we crossed the line, it was very clear to us that we had. So we’d go back and rewrite.

But I think that was always…I think we all had so much respect and loved Dory so much that it was never a fear of ours that we would ever cure her, in a weird way. That was never the goal, to cure her. And it was also never a threat of like, how do we make her seem silly, or kind of undermine who she is, because she’s just too beloved, I think, for all of us.

Justin: And how does it work in terms of the process, you know, the time when you’re working on the film, in terms of how many co-directors and so forth? How did you kind of work out who has responsibility for which?

Andrew: A lot of people don’t realise the co-director thing has been around since Toy Story, it’s just we didn’t have a name for it at the time. I was always John’s right hand man. I always said I was Robin to his Batman. And it wasn’t that I had a vision and I was trying to like share it. I was just the main supporter of whatever his vision was. And I was able to not only be at two places at once for him on Toy Story, but I was able to be the guy that he could trust when everybody else was saying no. I could go, “You know, I think you should say yes.” Or if everybody was saying yes, I’m like, “I think they’re all kissing your ass. We should just say no.”

I saw the power of that. So, Lee Unkrich was that for me on Nemo, and Angus has been that for me on this film. It’s a pretty powerful dynamic.

Angus: A lot of it is absorbing…very early on before the movie was announced, Andrew came to me and said, “I’m thinking about doing another Nemo. Before we tell anyone about it, I want to bring you in so that, as a co-director, you would be able to, from the very beginning, carry what I have envisioned for the movie.” And we talked a little bit about what we might want to see in this movie. So it was great to be there from the very beginning and be connected to the DNA of the film. It is interesting, though, Andrew also said, “I want you to do what isn’t being done.” So a lot of it is just a wide variety of things to help support his vision.

Andrew: You try to mind note. So if you’re asking Angus a question, pretty good chance you’re gonna get the same answer as if you ask me.

Justin: And Pixar famously has this brain trust where a group of the directors and producers and guys watch and comment on the future works, so to speak. I know you’re a part of that process, but how has it been on the receiving end of that?

Andrew: It sucks being on the receiving end.

Lindsey: It’s brutal.

Andrew: Nobody’s mean, but nobody couches anything because they get that you’re in the big leagues. You’re here to make a movie work, and you’re trying to make a movie work that’s for all ages and all over the globe. And you don’t think about that everyday, or else it would shut you down. You actually trick yourself into thinking you’re just making it for you and your peers, and that’s actually the healthiest thing to do. But at the end of the day, it still has to work. And the reason you listen to them, whoever it happens to be, the collection of people at the time, because the brain trust is large, it can change, is because they have no agenda. They have no skin in the game for it to have to be good or bad. They just are other filmmakers doing the same thing you are, fighting their films every day, so you really trust them.

And when they tell you something’s not working, or if they all seem to be nodding and saying, “This sounds like a good way to go versus that,” you have to pay attention to it. You don’t have to do the note, but you have to…you don’t have to do exactly what they say – it’s never that – but you have to address it somehow. Because nobody would be saying anything unless something was wrong.

Lindsey: I mean, we screened the movie nine times.

Andrew: Nine times.

Angus: Nine times.

Lindsey: Nine times.

Andrew: Nine times. Basically, we put it on the plate nine times, every four months.

Lindsey: And so, I mean, that’s a lot of putting stuff out there that you know isn’t working. I mean, it’s not as though every time we screened it, we were like, “This is amazing.” Most of the time, you’re putting it up there, going like, “This is not working.” And you’re just kind of not clear on where it isn’t working or what is working sometimes, because you’ve forgotten. So, it’s been incredibly helpful but incredibly humbling.

Justin: And sometimes for the sake of the movie, you have to lose characters, lose bits of plots. I mean, that must be tough.

Andrew: You lose stuff. Although, having done it for decades, you go in just knowing that’s gonna happen. You’re gonna lose a lot of stuff you’ve spent years working on.

Angus: It’s trial and error. A lot of the solutions for your movie, it’s like a river, and solutions will be kind of going by the river and you need to pick out the right things before they go away and you forget about them. Oftentimes, some of the solutions are things that have already gone by that you need to bring back, and go, “Well, that didn’t work before for these reasons, but now that the story has changed, we could use these elements now.” A lot of it is keeping track of that.

Andrew: For almost two years, there was an entire storyline where Marlon and Nemo got separated from Dory early when the squid chased them, and they didn’t even know where she went. They got stuck in the container yard, you know, the container graveyard, and they bumped into the tank gang, all stuck in one water bottle, sealed. Like, how the heck did that happen? And it turned out we made them this crack Mission Impossible team. Once they got out of their bags, they went everywhere. They went over the DMZ, they had done everything.

And they helped Marlon and Nemo, through all these crazy adventures with flying fish and everything, make it and find her. And it was really funny, but it was a lot of scenes. One of the things that was really hard to face, after about a year of look at it, was that every time we were with them, we were forgetting Dory’s agenda. And it was diluting you caring about her as you went through the movie. And so, for a moment, it was a hard thing to cut, but the second we did and simplified it to what you see now in this film, and the issue became between Marlon and Nemo and how they felt about Dory, everything just improved 100% in the film.

Justin: And when we touched on the fact that technology has changed hugely in 13 years, but every year, technology in this area is changing and developing. You’ve had to face massive challenges here, everything from shallow water to deep water. So, over fractions or reflections, all those intricacies, and even the human environment, the industrial human environment in the Marine Life Institute. How do you kind of prepare for it, in terms of the research trips and that kind of stuff?

Lindsey: We took a lot of research trips to various aquariums and rescue centres, and tried to see as much of the background we could. We also, obviously, learned about the animal behaviour and make sure that we’re taking advantage of anything we can from an animal behaviour standpoint. If you watch Nemo today, go back today, you should, because double feature, just in reverse. You’ll notice that we stay away…for instance, in the dentist office, you almost never see the corners of the tank, of the glass tank. And that’s because the renderer that we use could not kind of calculate the fraction of the water in two corners of the glass.

Andrew: You’re learning science, kids.

Lindsey: Very important stuff I’m teaching you that I have no idea what I’m talking about. But this new renderer we have, obviously, it does actually all of that calculation in real time. So we were able to do…that’s why you see us breaking the water surface all the time.

Andrew: Breaking the water surface was so hard to do, we barely did it in the first movie.

Lindsey: Yeah, and glass. You were seeing constant glass containers. I mean, it’s…

Andrew: But now you can do all that stuff. But it’s like buying a computer now that can do just so much. It’s like “This does more than what I’ll ever need,” but you end up doing everything you can with it. You maximise…your appetite just grows.

Justin: We’ve got Hank there behind us, but he actually also is incredibly difficult to design and animate, wasn’t he?

Andrew: He was a movie himself, in time and labour.

Angus: Two years to make the model itself before even moving it around. And the challenges of Hank are based around the fact that he doesn’t really have a skeleton, per se, but it’s sort of constantly undulating, which is a really challenging thing to animate. Also, the way that each of the tentacles moves, one tentacle takes a long time, with the suckers and the way that the meat of the tentacle slides on itself, and the musculature, and the suckers, and that’s times seven. That’s actually why we got rid of one of the tentacles.

Lindsey: That’s good producing.

Angus: Well, originally…

Lindsey: No, seven tentacles. That’s it.

Andrew: Wasn’t there a moment where we wanted to have him in the movie say, “They didn’t want to render my other tentacle. That’s why I’m a septopus.”?

Angus: I remember there was a meeting where the technical came to us like, “Okay, look, we have seven tentacles. If you want another one, after this point, it’s going to get really expensive. So we need to hold hands.” And this was before we had the joke about the septopus, and so we had to do this thing and kind of put in there. It was a little bit like Mickey Mouse only has four fingers, because there’s just less to draw.

Andrew: Also, one of the first shots we did with him, which is in the quarantine, you see him from the side on a wide-shot trying to pickpocket the tag off of Dory twice, that took an animator six months to do. We had our own wrap party when that shot finished.

Justin: I don’t know whether this is a question you can answer or not, but if you can try and put yourself back off of the first film, and if at that point 13 years ago you had to make a sequel, do you think this would have ended up as the same?

Andrew: No, I don’t think so. I think it would have been…I bet you it would have been about Dory, because that still would have been something that only had…anything I knew about Dory was still there 13 years later, what was missing from her. She’s the only character that still had stuff really missing, that was meaty, that had enough, from a writer’s standpoint, to just dig into.

Angus: Could have done Hank. Hank would have been off the table.  

Andrew: Hank wouldn’t have been there. I think also the manner in which we had to solve this story. It took the most intelligent crew I’d ever had. I mean, between these two and my writer, Victoria Strouse, and my max brace and my story team, and my editor Axel Geddes, it’s the smartest think tank I’ve ever had. And it brought us to our knees so many times. I don’t see how we could have solved it sooner.

Justin: I’m gonna open up and try and get some questions from the audience. Before I do that, there’s a question which somebody gave me, who is called Haley, and says she’s too shy to ask the question. So I was gonna read it for her. She says, “How did the team study for the characteristics, especially the whale shark? Was there anything from what you learned that touched you personally?”

Angus: For the whale shark?

Justin: Where is Haley?

Angus: She’s too shy to say.

Andrew: Don’t be shy.

Lindsey: Oh, she’s over there! Hi, Haley.

Andrew: Hi, Haley. I just wanted a big muppet, like, a big oven mitt. I kept doing this. Was Shari Lewis from the 50s? She did Lamb Chop. I remember telling them, “I just want Lamb Chop.” I just want like that. Little eyes, talking. Because I thought, for as large as a whale shark is, they’re just adorable-looking.

Lindsey: And [inaudible] was there from the very beginning, as a concept. Some of this was trying to figure out what clues we had left ourselves on the first film, of where Dory was from or what…and one of the clues, obviously, is that she speaks whale.

Andrew: Yeah, so how?

Lindsey: So we were like, “How does she speak whale?”

Andrew: And she doesn’t speak it well, so it can’t be an actual whale.

Lindsey: And it’s kind of unclear that she actually does speak whale. So then we were like, “Okay.” So we were kind of…that was always something that we were playing around with, was that she had to have and somebody from her childhood that taught her to do this. So that’s when we kind of came up with the whale shark.

Justin: And you’ve got the perfect people to voice as parents as well. I mean, Diane Keaton.

Lindsey: Oh, Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy.

Andrew: Everybody that you see in this film was our first choice. That’s one of the nice things about a sequel to a popular film, is that all the agents return your phone calls.

Justin: I thought they had done Keaton’s voice to character?

Lindsey: She’s never voiced a character.

Andrew: We feel so honoured. She was amazing. Almost makes you cry.

Lindsey: Okay, so it’s 87 minutes.

Andrew: I’ve got a calculator.

Lindsey: And 90 feet a minute, right?

Angus: And each foot has 16 frames.

Andrew: So 16 times 90.

Angus: But that’s not 90 feet, that’s 90 minutes.

Andrew: Just tell me what to add.

Lindsey: No, 90 feet a minute. So, times…

Justin: It’s a brain trust operation here.

Lindsey: Twenty-four frames a second times 60.

Angus: Times 90. Or times 60, times 90.

Andrew: So, 24 times 60, times 90. 129,600 frames.

Lindsey: There you go.

Andrew: You can round that out to 130,000 frames.

Andrew: Both were different. The first one was because I was a father of a young son in the late to mid 90s. I also grew up in a little town by the ocean, and I had a dentist office that had a fish tank in it. And I used to sit there and think it was so weird for fish to stare at people having their teeth work on. I thought, “What if a fish got lost and got put into that tank?” But it wasn’t until I was going out with my son to the park, and he was six or seven, and I said I had been busy, I hadn’t spent enough time with him. And I’m gonna be a real good dad, and we’re gonna have a great day. And I spent the whole day going, “Don’t touch that. Watch out. Don’t run into the street. You don’t know where that’s been.” And I was so concerned and worried and overprotective, that I kind of ruined the day.

And I realised, “Wow, here I am a father that loves my son. I want only the best, and I can’t get out of my own way.” And I thought, “That must be a really common problem.” So, suddenly I put the whole thing together. So that whole story about Marlon is me. I’m Marlon, basically.

And then the second movie, these characters already existed. I’m not Dory, none of us are Dory, so we kind of had to come from the outside in and go, “Who is Dory, and where is she from? She doesn’t know herself. And what is she trying to figure out?” But I did know that she had travelled the ocean…when I wrote the first movie, that she had travelled the ocean by herself for years, and didn’t know why, and didn’t know how. But because of her short term memory loss, she probably had met fish, after fish, after fish, and lost them or they had ditched her because she drove them nuts.

And so, she probably had this horrible sense of abandonment that was her fault. And I think that’s why she became really good at being funny, really good at caretaking, really good at being helpful, because it was her armour. It was her way of “Maybe you won’t leave me,” and that’s why she was so friendly with Marlon. So, with that evidence, we sort of kind of came from the outside in and learned about her. So it was more of an outside in for the second one.

Lindsey: Some of it was because of we knew where we were gonna be. So the fact that we knew that we were gonna be on the northern coast of California, so then we went, “Okay, there’s otters and there’s sea lions, and looms. Those are all animals that live around there.” And then we wanted a whale, some sort of whale, or whale shark. And then the rest were usually animals that we thought were really funny-looking.

Angus: Unusual, yeah.

Lindsey: Like beluga whales.

Angus: It’s funny-looking. Or if it didn’t actually see how the melon is officially called undulated was so disturbing that we knew it had to be in a movie.

Andrew: And otters.

Angus: I think it’s kind of what we’re fascinated by, and what would complement the characters.

Andrew: And we needed the characters to be best friends with Dory, that could get her across a park when there was no water. And we realised the most ambulatory, sneaky escape artist of all the sea life creatures is the octopus.

Andrew: Well, actually, the Marine Life Institute is very much designed based on an aquarium called the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, which is just south of San Francisco, and it has a natural little cove that water comes in around and that there’s sort of an observatory around it. We really liked that because, visually, it can tell you that it’s appreciative of the environment of the ocean and trying to be sort of conservation-minded. We loved that. Just visually, it said so much.

Justin: That also featured in Star Trek IV didn’t it?

Andrew: Yes, that’s true for some of you that really care.

Andrew: Because they scare the crap out of me. And sometimes the way I can not let them scare me anymore is because I actually put them in the movie, and learn how they’re actually made and see how they work. And then they don’t seem so scary to me.

Lindsey: There’s something terrifying of something coming out of the dark.

Angus: There was a lot of support for putting the kraken in the movie. This is the closest thing we could do to release the kraken without saying, “Release the kraken.” So it’s a nod to the kraken.

Justin: A tribute to Ray Harryhausen.

Andrew: How old are you now?

Girl: Five.

Andrew: Well, the soonest we can get one to you is when you’re nine. I don’t know if you’re willing to wait. I think that’s the very soonest.

Lindsey: There are lots of more Pixar movies coming up.

Andrew: Yeah, there will be more Pixar movies every year. I don’t know about the “Finding” ones.

Lindsey: But, I don’t know, we haven’t decided yet.

Andrew: We may have to do Finding Andrew first.

Justin: But it’s possible.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s possible.

Angus: That’s a good question. What’s the easiest character? You mean to make the model itself or the characterisation?

Andrew: I don’t think she’s parsing it.

Lindsey: What was easiest was having the characters from the first film, because we at least knew what they looked like.

Andrew: I’m gonna go with Nemo, because he’s small.

Lindsey: Well, here’s the deal. We wish we were that good at being able to predict which one of our movies is gonna be ready at any given time. And the reality is, we have about six or seven films going at any given time. And at some point, we all have to kind of sit down in a meeting and go, “All right, is it this or this one that feels more ready to go?” And what’s happened is…

Andrew: And it’s not by title, it’s by how good the story is.

Lindsey: It’s literally the story working. Which story is working to the point that we think we can start moving that into production? And so, what’s happened is, we have all these plans of sequel, original, sequel, original, and then none of that works. And so, we are now in a situation where we have a few sequels, a couple sequels in a row, and then we have about three originals that are ready to go after that. So I think the answer to that question, because I read the article, and I was like, “Aw, Jim.” I gave Jim, who was the one who said it, a lot of grief about it, and he’s like, “I didn’t say that.” What it is is that he’s basically saying that right now, we have a couple of sequels lined up, and then we have a bunch of originals coming up right after that. And after that, who knows? Because it’s all about which…

Andrew: Making stories, if you’re trying to be honest with him, is like raising children, and you have no say about when they’re gonna really get their act together.

Justin: But it’s true that at Pixar, it’s the original visionary who gets a chance to have a sequel.

Andrew: Not just who gets to work on it. It won’t happen unless the original visionary wants it to. So, they may not do it, but they may endorse it. But for me, I wanted to do it. That’s why nothing happened with Nemo. For as much as you see the rest of Hollywood going “Oh, it’s popular. Let’s jump on it for financial reasons, or for popularity reasons, or whatever,” we don’t. We go, “Look it, we’re gonna be living this thing for four years in isolation, with nobody watching us. This is not gonna be fun unless we’re doing it because we want to.” So, we wait until we’re inspired.

Lindsey: So, yeah, the plan right now, at least what we can say, is that there’s a couple sequels coming out, and then there’s about two or three original films that are in the works.

Justin: There’s Cars and The Incredibles isn’t there?

Lindsey: Yeah. And then you have Coco, which has been announced, which is coming out kind of in between those two. And then beyond that is all originals, right now. Now, that’s not to say that next year when I’m sitting here, I’m like, “Right, what I said last year is actually not true anymore.”

Andrew: Again, we don’t know how the children will be acting next year.