Finding Nemo. Fun Facts

CORAL REEF 
The shot of the single fish swimming away from the barracuda through the suddenly empty neighborhood, required 1,890 corals to be hand placed to complete the reef background, more than any other single shot. When Mr Ray takes Nemo and his friends on a FieldTrip to the DropOff, they had to use 12,996 individual corals to build all the reef sections they swim through. 

CHARACTERS 
It took a total of 361,975 feathers to cover all 7 pelicans in the shot in the film with the most pelicans, an average of more than 50,000 individual feathers per bird. There are 202 teeth in Bruce's mouth, each individually animatable. 

TURTLE DRIVE 
They had to create and simulate 800,000cm of the East Australian Current to complete both scenes with the turtles. That ends up being a tube about 5 miles long. To fill that tube and fully realize this location for the film, they had to use approximately 290,336 bubbles, along with 1,161,344 individual pieces of particle matter. 

FISH SCHOOLS 
It took about 1,000 individually animating fish to fill up the Fishing Net at the end of the film. Only 50% of the fish in the shot of the fish in the Fishing Net have blink cycles, and of those, about half of those blink only once, with the others having a mix of blink cycle timing letting them usually blink more than once during the shot, all at random times. 

There were 6 blink types in all used on the school. All fish schools that aren't swimming quickly do blink, move their gills, and have similar but different swim cycles, some faster, some slower, some more energetic or relaxed. Each species has it's own swim cycle based on the configuration of fins, body shape, and size. There were also a number of expressions used on the net sequence fish; sad, scared, nervous, happy, etc., depending on the shot and action. 

It took about 2,100 leaves to fill in the single shot of Nemo moving down the sewage stream into the treatment plant. It took 692 distinct schools of fish used in various places, in various scenes, in various shots, to make the film. It took 99,079 individual fish to fill out all those schools. They generated over 1.6 gigabytes of fish schooling animation data in order to move all those fish around. 

JELLYFISH 
The most jellies seen in any individual shot was 8,609 in the shot where Father and Dory race by camera as we pan with them. It took 74,472 total jellyfish to fully populate and fill out the entire sequence. 1,112 of those 74,472, were hand placed and hand dressed to camera, shot by shot. 

EXPLOSIONS 
It took 80 individual mine explosions to blow up the submarine. The most seen in any shot is the final shot of the sequence with 33 individual blasts, 34 explosion clouds, in only 30 frames. That shot required more than 120 layers in compositing to incorporate all the effects. 

HARBOR 
Many boats in the Sydney harbor are named after Pixar employees such as: David Salter, Jerome Ranft and Peter Sohn. One of the boats in the harbor is named "For the Birds", named after the Oscar-winning Pixar short. Another boat is named "Men V" which the name of the propriatory software used for the film. The Pizza Planet truck from "Toy Story" makes another appearance in the highway shot near the Dentists office 

WHALE
For a shading reference the art dept borrowed actual samples of whale skin and baleen from UC Berkeley for reference on the whale.

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