Finding Nemo with Rebecca Alter

8:31David Sims:No, it's the thing I really like about the Toy Story, certainly the first two, Toy Story 1 has this this has this some of the Pixar movies have this but this is a movie in which no one is consciously a villain

8:46Griffin Newman:uh yeah yeah I guess you're right cause like the conflict even the sharks are nice yes and the angler fish doesn't really have consciousness yes exactly that's like not a sentient fish although although Becca good point like what's up with that why doesn't he well there's also we learn that they there exists in the ocean petting zoos with snails. Yes. So snails aren't people but then like little shrimps are people. I love when a Pixar movie just has a fun joke because they're like that's a fun joke and then like 20 years later I'm like but I don't how does this fit into their theory of consciousness?

9:22Griffin Newman:Yeah this works into the implications of like there being a Cars Pope.

9:26David Sims:David, David I can explain it. It's very easy. The Witch from Brave carved 20 wooden sculptures each of them given life. Well aware.

9:33Griffin Newman:Are they still doing that with like you know, like Elio will come out and they're like, hey, how do we fit this into our grand Pixar unified theory? Well, Elio just exists like in present day Earth and present day space. Yeah, I guess recently they've been kind of hitting, here Griff, let me tell you something and then we'll introduce the show. Okay, I just want to tell you one thing. I was at the bar last week with my friend Caitlin, co-host of Hits Different, my baseball podcast. Secret podcast. It's not a secret, I want everyone to listen to it. Watching the Mets game and then they're like, hey, we're doing trivia.

10:04Griffin Newman:You know, hey, you want to do trivia? You know, they like, they have a sheet. This is kind of how you and I became. This is true. So close friends. And I was kind of like, bro, you're a sports sport. We don't need trivia. Like, pick a thing, right? Like, I'm already watching, but okay. And they're like, there's four rounds and you get to double one of the rounds and you have to pick. We'll tell you the categories now. Like daily double, you make it double or nothing for the value of the points. Franklin Park does it too. It wasn't, the bar was, it was 99 Rogers, not Franklin Park, but same idea.

10:29Same region.

10:30Griffin Newman:And so he's like, the categories are going to be like, this one's music, this one. And then he's like, the category three is animation. And I said to Caitlin, like, we're going to double that one. And Caitlin's like, really? And I'm like, I'm pretty sure. You're now. I'll be good at that. Yeah. And it was 20 questions. Write down every Pixar movie. No sequels. Yeah. So write down every Pixar movie, excluding the sequels. There's 20. Did you break a sweat? I didn't. I was like, okay, great. And I kept going. And I got 18. Do you want to know the two? I forgot. Then I run out of steam and I'm like, what the fuck?

11:02Griffin Newman:You know, like. Did you forget Elio? Nope. Had Elio. Does Lightyear count as a sequel? No. Yes. Lightyear counted as a sequel. He didn't want Lightyear.

11:10David Sims:This is tough because I'm like the ones that are.

11:13Griffin Newman:Did you forget Soul? I did not forget Soul. I'll give you a hint. One is a bad and somewhat forgotten Pixar movie. A good dinosaur. Bingo. A good dinosaur, which I've seen many times and yet still.

11:24David Sims:I was going to say, I assumed you'd remember that one because it is the shorthand, easy punchline bad Pixar movie.

11:31Griffin Newman:And yet, even then, it's anonymity still hurt it. The other one is one of the most iconic Pixar franchises. The worst one, but nonetheless a huge one. Correct.

11:40David Sims:You forgot Cars.

11:41Griffin Newman:Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Just because Cars suck so bad that I kept being like, I had fucking Elio. I had Soul. I had Dirty Radish. Where were you in 2006? I didn't see Cars in theaters. I'll tell you that much. I still haven't seen it. That actually boggles them. And my daughter never got into it. She's seen it, but she never yet. Although, I don't know. It hasn't really happened. I don't know. She still hasn't watched any of it. No, she's seen Cars. I love the concept of Lightning McQueen. I love the concept of Mater and Bonnie and Luigi and Doc Holliday or whatever. Like, I love the concept of all these cars.

12:18I just haven't seen the movie.

12:19David Sims:I'm a little surprised. It feels like a thing you would hyper fixate on because there's like a lot of rabbit holes to fall down in the Cars universe of just lines of thinking. Not even like actual things to study. That is true. Well, I love those. Like, I'll watch a YouTube video where someone does this thing where they connect it all and Cars is actually sci-fi post-apocalyptic. That's the stuff to me. I mean, some of that's interesting to talk about. No, but it's too literal. Yes. Having to make it all. I just think, like, in the way that you're saying, like, oh, they have a petting zoo with snails.

12:51David Sims:Like, what does that mean? Cars has seven things like that in every single frame. Every frame. It's so true. Right. And it's not stuff that, like, Pixar people are digging into online. It's the kind of stuff that, like, William S. Burroughs would spiral over at a bar. You know what? Maybe if it was a movie called High Speed Rail. Go on. Thank you. Exactly. Maybe I just don't like this bar culture. Wait. The Biden video that came out yesterday.

13:22Griffin Newman:Where he's like, doesn't this guy look like Obama? And he just brings a black guy on stage. No, but then the thing that makes it funny. You should be standing on the other side. is he looks like him just enough for him to be the funniest in the world. Right, I mean, it's not like he brought out like an 80-year-old man or something. Like, what's going to happen? Yes, you think it's just going to be like some, you know, like random person in the crowd. Biden is just being senile.

13:45David Sims:He didn't bring like Aaron Pierre on stage.

13:49Griffin Newman:Lanterns, they're going to solve the crime with their powers. Where are the jackets? Mufasa? You don't need the full jumpsuits anymore.

13:57David Sims:Just like a person. Here was the voice of young Mufasa. He's young. He's well, he's like middle Mufasa. Middle Mufasa. Right. And then because young Mufasa sings my favorite song in the world. Which is called the I Always Wanted a Brother song.

14:12Griffin Newman:I Always Wanted a Brother.

14:14David Sims:You don't remember that?

14:15Griffin Newman:I have seen Barry Jenkins' Mufasa, The Lion King. I'll admit it. It washed over me pretty fast. I didn't I didn't, you know, I didn't really retain. I'm making you listen to the song. Yeah.

14:25David Sims:I still have not listened to that. Watch that film. But the trailer only had one snippet of a song. The song's, of course, written by friend of the show Lin-Manuel Miranda. Is it the Mads Mikkelsen? No, it was just you heard them repeat, I always wanted a brother like five times. He always wanted a brother. So it was kind of memed. It's one of the many hooks in that song. Always wanted a brother. Bye Bye is a song? Yeah, that's Mads Mikkelsen's villain song. It is a little insensitive of you to invoke hooks on the Finding Nemo episode because, of course, those are the true unseen villain. Yes, man.

15:00Like Bambi.

15:01David Sims:The hook. Or hook like Peter Pan. Yeah. If he went hand fishing? Hook fishing? I mean, sure. I've lost this train of thought. Picture him sticking a worm on that. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. The dentist is benevolent. He's not fucking catching Nemo, frying him up. He thinks he's just like my little niece. It's nice to have fish in my tank. He says that he saved him. He's like there was this little baby clownfish all alone and I rescued it.

15:26Griffin Newman:That's a little bit of a savior complex thing where it's like, I mean, he was in the fucking water. He found Nemo. Sure, okay.

15:35David Sims:He saw the poster he was like. Oh, fish found in water? Challenge accepted.

15:40Griffin Newman:But you're right, there's no real villain. The closest thing is Bruce the Great White Shark and he has worked to overcome his villainy. But that's like a sequence. Anglerfish is a sequence. In 100 thrilling, perfect, funny sequences. Yes, yes.

15:55David Sims:Exactly. In 100 Thrilling Perfect Funny Minutes. There are contained... The movie's 100 minutes long. Self-contained conflicts within the larger conflict, which is just how do you get across the fucking ocean? I think this movie sets up so perfectly. The moment that Nemo's taken, you just start doing the math and you're like, how could he possibly find him?

16:12Griffin Newman:It's sort of the Pixar magic of the moving truck drives away and Woody is but a tiny little man.

16:19David Sims:How the hell's he going to get wherever they're going? I think this is the simplest and most extreme version of that, where you're just like, I don't even understand how he could begin to make contact with him, to locate where he is, to scale that distance. I'm getting emotional at you saying that, thinking about everything that Marlon and Dory accomplished. It is the movie, the moment in this film that makes me cry without fail every single time is when Nigel recounts the news that has...

16:47Griffin Newman:That's a lovely moment. It's a lovely moment done well by Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush. Yes. It's a pelican called Nigel.

16:53David Sims:And Oscar nominee Thomas Newman kind of going hard in that moment. Oh, the score. His eyes widening as Nigel's story goes down in the mix. Of his dad's heroism. And you see him pantomiming all the things that have happened, and Nemo realizes how much his father loves him. It gets me choked up just thinking about it. Today we're talking about Finding Nemo, which is one of the most successful movies in history. What is this miniseries called? I'm telling you what it's called. Please. I was talking about it with a guest who will be coming up on this miniseries.

17:23Griffin Newman:Yes.

17:24David Sims:I'm not going to say. And I said, I've had this one locked and loaded in the chamber. No need to pitch. This miniseries is called, and it's not going to work when I say it out loud, but it's really going to work visually. It will spell. This thing will spell. PodC.

17:41Griffin Newman:P-O-D-D. Hyphen C. I love it. PodC. I mean, what else are you going to call it? We're not going to call it Podding Neemcast.

17:52David Sims:Right. or finding podcasts. Who cares? Poddingcast-o. In the pod of a cast. Poddingcast-y. That's what was pitched to me. And I said, I don't think that's what's...

18:02Griffin Newman:Podsy. Podsy. Great. I love it. We're discussing here on Blank Check the films. Pod Carter? Pod Carter. Name it after his most famous, memorable, beloved film.

18:13David Sims:You know what I also like about calling it Pod Carter? It implies that it should have been called Pod Carter of cast and then the of cast was cut out. That is fun. It could just be podcaster, but then it would be impossible to tell what that even is. We can't do that. Right. Right. But also, to pay respect to John Carter, it has to be the version of the title that doesn't really work.

18:34Griffin Newman:We here are discussing this summer, this lovely summer that we're, I assume, having the films of Andrew Stanton. The six films total, I believe?

18:44David Sims:Yes. Two of them released in 2026 alone. Yes. Yes. A Man After Our Own Hearts. This is Blank Chick with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers, such as releasing Finding Nemo, what at the time was the highest grossing animated film in history, the highest grossing film Disney had ever released in any division, and I believe it was at the time the sixth highest grossing film in history. I know you always get angry when I try to get you to pull up these what was the record at the time. I can't. I did some research.

19:19David Sims:I found fucking Wayback Machine archived box office mojo pages. It was the sixth highest grossing film of all time.

19:26Griffin Newman:I remember when this film beat The Lion King to become the highest grossing animated film of all time because there was a big fight on the Oscar watch forums about which was the sort of more worthy film for that title. Yes. Like some people are like, ah, this sucks. Like this stupid, you know, fish movie. Lion King's so good. Other people are like, ah, Lion King's over. I remember that.

19:45David Sims:Nima's a fucking masterpiece. It also was humongous overseas. Yes. In 2003, it made, I believe,$850 million worldwide.

19:55Griffin Newman:Yeah, sounds about right. It's the number two of 2003.

19:58David Sims:The only movie that beats it is Return of the King, and Return of the King becomes only the second film to ever make a billion. Can you name the animated films that since dethroned the movies we're talking about? This is what I was trying to do the math on, right? Because it has the record for a year. It kind of, like, blows the ceiling off of what an animated film can do, especially globally. and then Shrek beats it a year later. It beats the opening weekend record. Shrek 2. Shrek 2. Uh, sure. Shrek 2 beats it domestically, beats the opening weekend record. Right. Shrek 2 becomes the third highest grossing film in history at the time.

20:34David Sims:We love it. At the time, I think it was Titanic, Star Wars, and then Shrek 2 domestically. And of those, I know my favorite. Now, I would argue this is the beginning of, I say this respectfully, the unshittification of the all-time top 10.

20:49Griffin Newman:Yeah, it just starts to be a lot of crap.

20:51David Sims:It also starts to be like every year two movies enter the 10, so the churn becomes so fast. Yeah. Up until 2003, it felt like there was a 10 where you're like, of course, there are two Star Wars in there. Gone with the wind. Oh, it's not adjusted. Not adjusted. Oh, well then it's a useless metric, not adjusted. You could compare the two lists, but it also felt like the unadjusted numbers were like, even unadjusted E.T. is still bigger than most movies ever released. And then everything starts kind of like usurping. So Shrek 2 dethrones Finding Nemo. And then I think Shrek 2 has it until Toy Story 3.

21:32David Sims:You are correct. And then basically it becomes a sequel rally. This is the thing.

21:36Griffin Newman:Despicable Me 2 does well, but I think doesn't quite be Toy Story 3. And then Finding Dory overtakes it. You have Dory But what about Yeah No Dory never overtook Toy Story 3 Although this is a little complicated Because a lot of re-releases have adjusted these numbers somewhat Sure But I can tell you Frozen certainly beat it Frozen becomes the new number one But beat Toy Story 3 Domestically?

22:05David Sims:No worldwide This is all worldwide I don't have domestic

22:08Griffin Newman:This is worldwide And then it's sort of like do we count the Lion King remake? This is the big question. It is animated. It's obviously a film made by computer graphics and animation.

22:21David Sims:They tried to pretend it wasn't. I would argue it held the record, but only for a little bit.

22:27Griffin Newman:Yes, because Frozen 2... No, Lion King actually grows slightly more than Frozen 2.

22:32David Sims:And did Incredibles 2 take over at any point?

22:35Griffin Newman:Incredibles 2's peak was 2. Okay. A second.

22:38David Sims:But I do think Incredibles 2 did take the domestic for a moment.

22:42Griffin Newman:But then Inside Out 2 and Zootopia 2 and Neja 2. Right. Neja 2 is now the number one highest grossing animated film worldwide. It has made$2.2 billion.

22:52David Sims:And Zootopia 2 is the highest grossing American animated film. Right.

22:58Griffin Newman:And also the best. Yeah. But this is another thing.

23:02David Sims:There were very few animated sequels until Shrek 2. Theatrically released. Shrek 2 helps break the taboo of like... Toy Story 2 was an outlier. Straight to video Disney sequel. Toy Story 2 is an outlier, of course, bumped up from home video to theatrical. It's massive, but it doesn't overtake Lion King. And then Trek 2 is the first sequel to take the crown. And it does feel like the stigma is off of doing animated sequels. And then it's just everyone playing like, I don't know. It's a baton race between the franchises. It's crazy that they did Rescuers Down Under. Yes. Especially when they did.

23:39David Sims:Wasn't that, well, go ahead. No. He knows why. I'll tell you what the logic was. Right. It was like Eisner and Katzenberg Takeover. Right.

23:45Griffin Newman:And they're like, we want a sequel. They're like, we should do a sequel. That feels like a thing we should do. To like our least beloved one. No, but I think they were just kind of like, Rescuers is one of the only ones that makes sense for a sequel. Yeah, truly. Most Disney movies have a pretty definitive ending.

23:57David Sims:That's the thing. What's wild is they were like, it feels like good business sense to do a sequel, but also we should do a sequel that doesn't betray the integrity of the original film. So they still were making kind of like an artistically driven story decision, Where they're like, well, Rescuers is a book series. It feels more episodic. You can just send them on another mission. Every other Disney animated classic feels like a closed loop.

24:21Griffin Newman:And with someone getting married or whatever. Pinocchio becomes a real boy or whatever.

24:25David Sims:It was truly like people. Captain Hook is beheaded. People won't be insulted if we do Rescuers 2. It won't be betraying the sanctity of something.

24:33Griffin Newman:They should do Cinderella 2 and just like she got divorced. Well, they did two or three even straight to video. And one of them is a crazy time one. One of them is like a Back to the Future 2.

24:43David Sims:That sounds good. Shit. People like it. Oh, they do. Oh, people like it. People. Humans. I'm going to ask our guests. Have you seen any of the direct-to-video Cinderella's? I have not, but I'm sure I've watched some Jenny Nicholson or some such person recap them. Yes. Yes. I think it's called a Stitch in Time, maybe. It's a something in time. And the weird thing about those— Cinderella 3, a twist in time. A twist in time. Weird thing about those, they came out at the same time as all of the Barbie straight-to-video ones, which were also doing some very exciting things with the same IP.

25:19Griffin Newman:This does say, unlike most direct-to-video sequels, this received generally positive reviews. Yeah, people like this one. So maybe it's like, what's the fairy godmother goes back in time and kills Hitler or whatever.

25:30David Sims:Yeah, that's why they like it. So yeah, focus groups were really happy about that. Do you know who wrote, or I shouldn't say wrote, but much like Malignant, has a screenplay credit, part of the team, on many of those Barbie's 2000s animated films. Can you give a clue? He was played by Brian Cox in a movie. I don't know. Robert McKee? Yes. Yeah. That's one of those things where Robert McKee's story, the book that everyone talks about, of like, this is everything you need to learn about like...

26:00Griffin Newman:Ah, the three-act structure.

26:02David Sims:Studio, Western, you know, popcorn screenplay structure. And they'd be like, what has this guy done? Why am I listening to this guy as an authority? And you look it up and it's mostly Barbie animated movies. Where he was like a story consultant. Today we're talking about Finding Nemo. Our guest, Rebecca Alter. Rebecca!

26:20Griffin Newman:Hi. Is this your main feed debut? It's my main feed debut.

26:23David Sims:And I'm going to say the best movie you've been asked to cover on this show. Absolutely. I think this movie is a little better, no offense Ben, than Look Who's Talking Now. Okay. Fair enough. It's slightly more successful. has had slightly greater cultural impact. Both talking animal movies, though. True. This is true. I'm happy to carve a lane. It feels like it is an interest of yours. Is that fair to say? Yeah. This is one of your beats as a journalist. I guess so. Just other Finding Nemo records, it is still the highest grossing physical media release of all time.

26:59Griffin Newman:Is that so?

27:00David Sims:The Finding Nemo DVD is like, and part of it is just it comes out at the peak of DVD as a medium. That DVD went triple platinum in the built-in minivan DVD player. True. In my mom's minivan. It's the accessibility of the video game consoles are adding DVD players. DVD players are in cars now. DVD players are in computers. You know what else was in cars? Cars. In the movie Cars. I don't know if you guys caught this. A very insidious announcement. The baby cars? Home entertainment. That's the most evil shit I have ever seen. They're doing baby cars. They announced Ben and Becca. They announced this week that there is a Disney Junior TV show that's like Muppet Babies with the cars characters.

27:44Wait, but Lightning had never met them before.

27:47David Sims:I love that you know this much about the chronology without having seen any of the films. Well, do you know why? Why? Because I love Radiator Springs and Disney's California Adventure. It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to on Earth. So I said I need to know the lore. Fellow gentlemen of the Blank Check podcast, there is going to be a good amount of theme park talk on this episode. I regret to inform you. I warned David in advance. I brought like a sleeping bag.

28:09Griffin Newman:I could just like curl up under a hammock, maybe. Pour the caffeine. Hammock on the porch. You're staying wide awake for this shit. Question about the cars. Yeah. The baby cars. Are they wearing diapers?

28:21David Sims:No, they're just kind of. Because they're leaking oil? They just like. It's a good question. I guess. What's the term I'm looking for? Kawaii? Is that? Yeah, kawaii. I mean, like, they just make them squished and rounder and their eyes are bigger.

28:34Griffin Newman:I mean, we'll see this with Finding Dory, of course, when they have baby Dory, you know, like. What is genuinely a billion dollar idea?

28:40David Sims:Like, put baby Dory at the beginning of the film. Dory small. It saved the economy. Can I say what I think the most consequential thing to come out of cars is on the entire culture? Mm-hmm. We all grew up with the little tykes red car, yellow roof. Uh-huh. That was a car. Yeah. Sometime after cars, they gave that car a face, like eyes and a face. Sure. And now kids grew up with that car being like a person. Yeah. Car that they're inside. And I don't think that would have happened. This is what Lightning Racers looks like. It only looks like 10 % cuter than the regular car. Yeah, they actually look identical.

29:13David Sims:But I imagine they're going to have little kid voices.

29:15Griffin Newman:But is this suggesting that, like, Lightning went to Radiator Springs as a child? A new mater? Because, like, in cars, he's meeting them all for the first time.

29:24David Sims:My understanding is that what it suggests is who gives a shit? It's going to make trillions of dollars. much like Muppet Babies, which doesn't really make sense as anything other than a what-if alternate universe. The series follows Lightning McQueen as he takes on fresh challenges and races around Radiator Springs alongside his old pal Mater.

29:42Griffin Newman:Is it just kind of like, fuck it. Like, it's parallel. Don't worry about it. The new friends are thrill-seeking drag car Pipes and mud-loving monster truck Miles.

29:53David Sims:Perfect. Which is a great name for a car. I mean, it sounds like the fucking movie cast is back. Owen Wilson, Larry the Cable Guy, Bonnie Hunt. So they're all gonna have grown-up voices. They're recasting Paul Newman.

30:07Griffin Newman:Yeah, well, he's dead. So, I mean, that is the reason to recast him, right?

30:11David Sims:I'm hearing this for the first time. Fighting Nemo, best-selling DVD of all time. It's also, if you look at all the video game platforms of this moment, Game Boy Color, PS2, GameCube, it is, like, amongst the top 20 highest-selling games on all of those platforms. It is just a movie that kind of coincides with like geek mainstream American media and the tendrils of it all just like rise to the top. We had the Shark Tale PlayStation 2 game, but not the Nemo. And what happens in the Shark Tale video game? There was a level where you could make the Will Smith fish dance to You Can't Touch This. Yeah.

30:59David Sims:Sounds pretty good. It was pretty awesome. Was it like Parappa the Rappa style dancing? Like Dance Dance Revolution style dancing?

31:06Griffin Newman:So I'm watching a full gameplay walkthrough here. That's the only part I remember. But we didn't have Shark Tale on home video, and we did have Nemo.

31:13David Sims:Yeah. Kind of everyone had Nemo.

31:16Griffin Newman:Shark Tale came out, what, a year after Nemo? Yeah. Yes. I just remember being one of those things where, like, Nemo, which the movie we're going to talk about today, the water effects and, like, the way it looks, It's just such a staggeringly good looking movie. It still looks incredible. I think it's maybe like the most beautiful movie Pixar ever made. Yes. And then Shark Tale comes out a year later and looks like a fucking PlayStation game. Yes. And like the fish designs are horrendous, but all of it looks bad.

31:45David Sims:But it also, like there's like no water effects. Right. There's no lighting. And you're like, how do they move? And it's like they sort of just walk upright in the water, not on the ground, not on the ocean floor. And they have like houses and stuff. Yes. There's a thing.

32:00Griffin Newman:Ants and bug life. Bugs life. Bug life. Bug life. Sorry. I'm using myself. Like, they just like look distinctive.

32:09David Sims:They were going for different things. And in fact, you could argue that the DreamWorks one is the more realistic looking one.

32:15Griffin Newman:It's absolutely the more realistic looking one. And it kind of pulls it off. Ants ain't blue and ants do not have just two legs, you know? Right, right. In the DreamWorks one, they have four legs and two arms. it's you know whatever it sort of was okay and then like the comparison wasn't as drastic i guess

32:31David Sims:is what i mean uh sure finding nemo shark tail disaster i i saw a thing andrew stanton said that really stuck with me which he when when they started working on this movie he was like the challenge i pose to all of you is i don't want to anthropomorphize these fish i want to figure out the way for them to be able to convey emotions within the physiology of how they actually work it's a good call and it's one of these things where you watch this movie and it's like they create this role for themselves that they hold themselves to. And the movie really doesn't fucking cheat on it. And it makes it all the more impressive how good I think the performances are in this movie.

33:04David Sims:And I speak of the voice acting, which is obviously like this is just an impeccably cast movie that changes a bunch of fucking careers and shit. But also the actual like character animation performances of the movie are insane. Who's your favorite? The bench is so deep. It's It's impossible. I think Brooks is the reason this movie really works, and we'll get into it. Watching it this time, and this is a movie I have seen more times than I can count, I was really, really locking into the Defoe performance, which I think is incredible. Very good. Who are your answers? Oh, I was thinking more about...

33:41Griffin Newman:Stingray teacher. Oh, yeah. Fucking all day and night. The model of pedagogy. That guy is the best. Mr. Ray. The way he diffuses various things. There's nothing to see here. That, and also when Nemo's trying to say, and he's like, all right, kid, don't knock yourself out. You know what I mean? Like things like that. So good.

34:00David Sims:This is, to your point, Becca, though, it's like this movie has like 130 perfectly executed bits. Yeah. Like any character in this movie that would be kind of just like a functional point A to point B exposition driver or whatever, they give a character game that is so efficient and memorable and charming. Yeah. Where no one in this movie feels like they're just filling a spot. The games are clear and distinct and they're all like, they all feel so satisfying to the creature that they are.

34:31Griffin Newman:My other favorite is Allison Janney. I love, love, love Peach so much.

34:36David Sims:But this is what we're talking about, right? Where it's just like, there's a chain of logic that is very satisfying of like, what is the personality of a starfish? And you're like, well, if she's in a tank. She sucks at the wall, she surveils. She's watching. Right. And then what's the superiority complex she has about that? She basically becomes the know-it-all because her job is to be on watch. I just love the show. And then who's the person who voices that? Well, of course, get, like, the fucking lady from the West Wing. That's what her personality would be. Like, all of these choices are so satisfying in a chain of logic way.

35:07David Sims:I love Vicky Lewis. Everyone's incredible in this. Is anyone bad? No. And, like, Bob Peterson, who you're calling out as Mr. Ray, is one of the Pixar guys.

35:15Griffin Newman:Oh, I know. I know. He's Roz.

35:16David Sims:He's my friend. He is Doug.

35:18Griffin Newman:Yeah.

35:18David Sims:He, of course, was the original fire director of The Good Dinosaur, the movie you can't even remember. The fire director. Oh, fire. Okay, right. Because it was Son. Son? It became a Pete Son picture. But that is the chaos period where suddenly, like, every director is getting fired. Every movie is being replaced. Is Son getting a third? He's doing Incredibles 3. He's doing Incredibles 3. A little bit of a step down. It should be the next generation, and it's like Jack-Jack's a dad.

35:46Griffin Newman:That would be pretty funny. Craig T. Nelson's old. David's laughing. I'm laughing. I don't know. Maybe it'll be good. It's totally not. It's totally going to be Paddington in Peru, in my opinion. Peru wrote the script. I know. So that's cool. Like, my guess is it'll be something where I'm like, this resembles what I like about the, you know, all of this. Yeah. But it, you know, it feels a little chintzy.

36:05David Sims:It's very frustrating. It's a little frustrating. Pete Stone has made, this will be the third film he directs. We're going to talk about a lot about Pixar director careers in this series, a thing I studied deeply. But he's directed three films. He's one of the kind of Pixar brain trust top story guys who's worked on all these projects. And he himself has voiced so many beloved characters like Emile and Ratatouille. Sure. Socks, who is arguably the only good part of Lightyear. Socks is fun. Definitely the only good part of Lightyear. Like he's a really, really fun voice actor. Noted. He's there.

36:37David Sims:Gun to your head, can you name that character? I just remember that he's riffing on a level that's just sublime. It is. He does some shit with a pen.

36:44Griffin Newman:I couldn't name any fucking character in Lightyear, and it's called Lightyear and stars Buzz Lightyear, and I'm still like, is that character called Buzz Lightyear?

36:51David Sims:I don't want you to call mental health hotlines on my behalf, but I did the other night fall down a rabbit hole of watching Lightyear videos on YouTube. Well, it's the movie about the man on which the toy is based. Becca, I'm sorry, but this is not a movie about the toy. This is a movie about the real person Buzz Lightyear. The real person on which the toy was based.

37:21Griffin Newman:Squirt in this movie. Is Brad Bird's son.

37:24David Sims:I was about to say, the little baby turtle. That's Brad Bird's son, Nicholas Bird. Who Andrew Stanton heard him speak and was like, this is our generation's thumper. Rarely do you find... He might also be the, what are you waiting for, to do something incredible, I guess, kid in Incredibles, if I'm not mistaken. Something amazing, I guess. Yeah. I think that's him as well. This is the cross-pollination of all these things. This is a period of time where Pixar has been super tight and focused. Right. Basically, one, like, dream team of people working in all these movies. And for the first time, it's starting to spread out.

38:01David Sims:They're starting to have multiple productions running at the same time. You know, the first three movies are all directed by the same very normal man with really normal boundaries who just loves hugging. And Pete Docter and Andrew Stanton were the first two people hired at Pixar. Yes.

38:22Griffin Newman:They have their sort of initial fabled kind of like early what kind of movies could we do meeting, right? Where they like supposedly. We're going to crack open the dossier. Yeah, let's crack open the dossier.

38:41David?

38:42David Sims:Yes? Got any big summer plans? Sleep. Your plan is to sleep for the whole summer, Rip Van Winkle style? Sounds good. I'll tell you what my plan is. What's that? To drink AG1 every morning. Of course. Well, you better, or else you're going to crumble into dust. This is the problem. Any other plans I make would be foolish, foolhardy, if I weren't also planning to regulate my system with AG1. Because it doesn't matter if you're traveling, you got late nights, packed weekends, zero structure, any of those. Keeping AG1 in your routine helps you stay consistent. That's a loaded word right there. Consistent.

39:19David Sims:When everything else gets, and here's another loaded word, unpredictable.

39:23Griffin Newman:Oh, I don't want that. And I know you don't either. Look, it's a daily health drink with a multivitamin. Yep. Pre and probiotics. Yep. superfoods and antioxidants.

39:35David Sims:It's an all-star lineup. One scoop, eight ounces of water. You just shake it up. There you go. That's it. You drink it. It takes 30 seconds. Now, the summer's where you want to get a little lax and you want to let yourself go and have fun. But just these 30 seconds a day help keep everything else in shape.

39:51Griffin Newman:But this is kind of like an old-fashioned formula with like one to two ingredients, right?

39:56David Sims:No, no, no. Oh, wait a second. What? David, I'm laughing so hard at your ignorance. This is a next-gen formula that delivers 75-plus ingredients. Backed by four clinical trials, clinically shown to support gut health, fill common nutrient gaps, and improve key nutrient levels within three months. And I want to thank the announcer from Bar Rescue for jumping in for that one section.

40:19Griffin Newman:Very exciting. Look, late nights, long weekends, spontaneous plans, life happens. AG1's going to help you keep things consistent, like Griffin's saying. Consistent. Give you high-quality nutritional support every single day. no matter where you're starting your morning. I know you drink it every single day.

40:35David Sims:What's your favorite flavor right now? Right now, I'm actually really big into berry. I've been cycling through them and I've really been enjoying this berry phase. I will say this as well, David. Yes. You said it wherever you are. I'm about to go away for six weeks and you better believe I just ordered a whole box of travel packs so that I don't have to travel unarmed.

40:56Griffin Newman:I had no doubt. Visit drinkag1.com slash check to get your free morning person hat and free AG1 flavor sampler in your welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription. That's an$82 value. That's drinkag1.com slash check. When I wear that hat,

41:15David Sims:it's going to be so ironic. Yes.

41:29David Sims:basically you know pixar is originally a computer technology company they're like we should have an animation division someone should be fucking around with this computer animation thing and seeing if there's any money there it's of course a company started by george lucas John Lasseter is fired from Disney where he was kind of constantly the guy who was next up to maybe direct a feature. The one that comes really close to happening is Where the Wild Things Are. There was animation test you can see that's really interesting. Lasseter, like when he saw Tron, was just like, this is the future. There's some future in combining these things, which Disney ends up obviously doing with like Beauty and the Beast and Lion King with their big set piece sequences using CGI backgrounds.

42:14David Sims:Where the Wild Things Are was supposed to be that. He also develops Brave Little Toaster, which is taken away from him. Which feels very spiritually Pixar.

42:22Griffin Newman:Yeah, it's a movie with Pixar juice, even if it's, right, like, kind of cheap and light on execution.

42:27David Sims:And Toy Story definitely feels like a refinement of everything he was starting to noodle with. But he gets fired. He goes to this computer conference. I think it's SIGGRAPH. Yeah. He makes the play. They hire him to be the animation guy. He's one dude noodling. And when they finally go, like, we have some extra budget to see if there's more that can be built here who would you want to hire he goes to his two CalArts classmates Pete Docter who becomes the first person other than last year to direct the Pixar movie Monsters Inc and then Andrew Stanton's the second that's sort of the next phase is the anointment of you guys get to make your own movies this is true

43:05Griffin Newman:um and yeah they were they were pretty good uh before I opened the dossier Becca your experience with Finding Nemo you're slightly younger than me Did you see this in theaters? Absolutely. And I feel like everyone I've spoken to really remembers seeing it in theaters as well. I would have been nine. And I think I loved it. But it was also a time when like every year of my life, like one new landmark animated movie would come out that felt like it was just a constant heightening because it was sort of like tail end of Disney renaissance. Yeah. And the early Pixar's and throw Shrek into the mix.

43:46Throw, you know, as a kid, it was huge Ice Age into the mix. Like every year there was a new animated movie that felt like the biggest thing in the world.

43:54David Sims:You have basically concurrent with the decline of Disney feature animation. You have three new animation studios rising. And it's still basically only like two or three animated movies a year. It is so different than the current landscape where we're just inundated with shit. Yeah. And they were like really trying shit like in a quality like way to one up each other. So even though I was I didn't see Anastasia. I was too young when it came out. Like that was a really important VHS tape. But Anastasia from random third studios joining the mix. I was going to say Anastasia is part of the kind of like 90s rush.

44:36David Sims:And there's the 80s rush as well of like Don Bluth has left. Other studios are trying to see Disney's week. Is there a chance to dethrone Disney and be the default animation studio? And then when Disney rises again, it's even more of a feeding frenzy of Jesus Christ, they're making so much money. We should be in this business. But you look at those movies in the 80s and 90s, and it's primarily either feature length adaptations of TV shows, which are sort of their own thing and are often junkier and lower budget. Right. Or it's other studios trying to figure out how to crack the Disney playbook.

45:12David Sims:Anastasia is very much. Can we do the Disney thing? when Toy Story comes out it's like this absolute lightning bolt of like wait a second is there actually not a one kind of formula pattern for what an American animated movie can be while being seen as like A-level you know highbrow and then I think DreamWorks and Blue Sky these other studios are all going like fuck is there a chance to like define what your own thing is there's new visual styles possibly there are no storytelling styles there are new styles of humor Suddenly these things don't have to be musicals. They don't have to be based on fairy tales.

45:49Plus there's some stop motion entering the mix.

45:52David Sims:Absolutely. Yep. I'll also say like even though I was like becoming aware of movies during the era that like people, that some people see as the decline of the Renaissance. Sure. Because of when they came out. Like Tarzan is still maybe my favorite. Right.

46:09Griffin Newman:This is something that as you know, I like am in media and whatever. I mean, I'm like, I know people who are a little younger than me. And I'm like, right. Tarzan, like, I don't, I saw that in theaters. But by then I was like, oh, the juice is out of this. I mean, Emma Stefanski in our Treasure Planet episode, where I was like, right, I didn't even see this shit. And she's like, oh, I, when I saw this, I assumed it was the biggest hit of all time. Like, it was just a giant movie for us.

46:33David Sims:The difference is Tarzan was a huge hit. Tarzan was a huge hit. Tarzan, like. But to me was just like, okay. And Tarzan rips. Massive soundtrack.

46:40Griffin Newman:I mean, you'll be in my heart. Right. Phil Collins. Yeah, I don't mind Tarzan. I've seen it since. He's got the invisible touch.

46:48David Sims:My personal bias aside, Tarzan is like very well reviewed, right? It was definitely a hit. It's a massive hit. Yes. The soundtrack is really like culturally important. But five or six months later. Really culturally important. At the time it was fucking humongous. We've gotten criticized for being like the Tarzan soundtrack obviously sucks. I'm pumping the brakes.

47:11Griffin Newman:I don't think it sucks.

47:12David Sims:I just don't think it was cultural. It's adult contemporary. It was not like a Lion King level earwormy. It was the second closest they had ever gotten to that. I disagree. And You'll Be In My Heart was their last sort of like credits adult contemporary hit song of the 90s. They closed out. I don't care that much for Tarzan, but I just think these are objective facts. I think the tree surfing and the vine swinging looks awesome. This is my bigger point is like big hit totally works. There is this sense of like, is Disney back? Have they saved themselves? Five months later, Toy Story 2 comes out, and it feels like the takeaway from everyone is like, Tarzan's the end of an era, and this is the future.

47:49David Sims:We all had fun with Tarzan, but we're moving past this.

47:54Griffin Newman:The formula, it's no good anymore, right.

47:57David Sims:In the 2000s, Lilo and Stitch is the only Disney feature theatrical animated movie that I would say unequivocally works. That is the only one. No, I think Empress and the Frog. I'm saying financially, critically, and test of time.

48:13Griffin Newman:Okay.

48:14David Sims:And personally, it was a disappointment at the time. I guess so. It was, at the box office. Sure, financially, it was a little... You've heard about what they're building. They're building an Yzma coaster in Villainland. What? They're doing a pull the lever. What? Because they've downgraded from it was going to be a Maleficent water ride thing. What is Villainland? Here's a fun game. David, what do you just think Villainland is? From saying what Becca just said.

48:41Griffin Newman:From hearing her say that. So it's... Because I'm, like, really bad at this. Is it just in Walt Disney World or is it in both? It would only be in World for now. Because World's larger. There's more space for stuff.

48:52David Sims:That's Orlando. But...

48:54Griffin Newman:And I know World has... It's made up of multiple parts. Right. So I know there's, like, Epcot and Animal Kingdom and all this. You name two. Can you name the other two? Is there one that's just kind of, like, Maine Disney? Yeah. Could you think of what it's called? What would your guess be for what it's called? It's Disney World. No, I have no idea. Magic Kingdom. Yes, I did know it. I did know it. And then is like Star Wars world its own thing or is that within one of the worlds? Yeah, right. See, this is where they get me. Think of the movies.

49:21David Sims:The movies? Now, the problem is this land has changed names many times. Okay. Give me another hint. It was called Disney MGM Studios. It is now Disney Hollywood Studios. Yeah, I would have accepted MGM. Right. So that is them competing with Universal Studios.

49:37Griffin Newman:I get that. Is there another one?

49:39David Sims:Epcot was Walt's Dying Witch. I know about Epcot. And Animal Kingdom was them competing with SeaWorld and Bus Gardens. Right, all that shit. Okay. Those are the four in Orlando. There's fucking water parks that I think back over on the same page. Don't fucking count. That's not a proper game. Yeah, I still haven't ever been. The villain world is in the Magic Kingdom.

49:59Griffin Newman:Correct. Yeah, it will be. Now, why are they doing that? Villains are probably the descendants. No, no, no. What are they competing with? Think movies again.

50:07David Sims:What are they competing with? The Dark Universe, of course. No, truly. Is that Universal opened their new park in Orlando where they reclaimed the name Dark Universe and applied it to Monster Theme Park. And so now Disney's like, fuck, they have a cool scary thing. We need a cool scary thing. Villainland. Now, all the rumors had been it was going to be built around Maleficent as the centering force.

50:32Griffin Newman:And they're sort of realizing, like, maybe Maleficent's kind of old news. Oh, no, they still are doing the Maleficent water ride. A third Maleficent movie? Like, they're always claiming they're going to do that.

50:44David Sims:I mean, that's part of why Tron Ares happened, because they also had spent hundreds of millions of dollars building a Tron roller coaster. Yeah. And they wanted object permanence for that franchise. But interesting. So Yizmo would be its own ride. It's not replacing Maleficent? Yeah, it's not replacing Maleficent. But this was announced after the first announcement, and I think there were conversations about them actually scaling back the scary on Maleficent. This is the thing. Disney's a little cowardly about getting too scary. Yzma's more funny than scary. Does she give them an easy out?

51:18Griffin Newman:Right. But then it's just like, why are you doing it? They love giving Patrick Warburton something to do. Sure.

51:27David Sims:I'm looking up villain land. Ember's New Groove is a masterpiece, but it was not a major hit. Yeah, it was a minor hit at best. And it was not really appreciated at the time. Yeah, and then, I mean, obviously. You're like, Treasure Planet Atlantis are just like complete belly flops for them. Home on the Range is the last hand-drawn. Lilo and Stitch is the one upswing there, and it's the movie that basically sneaks through the cracks. And then that first CGI run's a disaster. And then you have Princess and the Frog at the end where it's like,

51:52Griffin Newman:did pretty good, people liked it,

51:54David Sims:but maybe even that underwhelmed. And had the pressure on it of, can this bring back the Disney Princess movie in hand-drawn? It does okay, but it does well. But the next year, Tangled comes out, and once again it's like this is the future here's our model this is what we're doing we've redefined what our sort of Disney animated movie format is um but so that leaves the floor open for Pixar, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky to invent a new thing and to really be like right it's all open game and what Andrew Stanton talks about is feeling like Toy Story Monsters Inc and Bug's Life all shared a similar vibe.

52:35David Sims:The first three, obviously, a lot of that's that they're directed by... Same Huggy guy. Lotso. Lotso, Huggin' Lasseter. But also that it's the one core team working on every movie. Pixar basically at this point only has enough employees to be focused on one movie at a time. Yeah. And when Lasseter goes, Doctor, you get a movie, Stan, you get a movie, they start expanding the crew and they're splitting up who's getting Peterson, who's getting Joe Ranft, who's getting Pete Soane, all these story guys. He said that to his doctor? He was like, doctor, you got a movie.

53:04Griffin Newman:The doctor was like, I think you should give it to one of your employees. But Doctor I Am movie? That'd be good.

53:08David Sims:Why wasn't Dr.

53:09Griffin Newman:Mario in Super Mario Galaxy?

53:10David Sims:I'm sure that was going to happen. I sent you a video, the theory, that Dr. Mario is legally classified within Nintendo's copyrights as his own character and not Mario himself.

53:19Griffin Newman:So it would have to be like Mario has a cousin who's a doctor. This is the way. That's what the dad should be disappointed about.

53:25David Sims:That would be funny. Why aren't you a doctor like your cousin? He's got so many pills. Of all colors. I sent you this TikTok video that someone pointed out in the first Super Mario movie, there was an empty seat at the family dinner table where Mario's dad's like, I don't respect you being a plumber. And there's like a little nephew there whose dad is missing. And the implication is maybe does he hate his plumber son so much because his other son. Successful medical student. And if Mario's the last name, then his name might be Dr. William Mario. This is the thing. Now every animated movie and kids movie in a bad way is about like weird dad angst.

54:02But this is really groundbreaking and genius about weird dad angst.

54:09David Sims:This movie is made by a dad working through his things versus I think a lot of animated movies and specifically illumination films. And who knows why this is the case. Right. Feel very driven by.

54:21Griffin Newman:They've been told to be about this. Yes.

54:22David Sims:Well, and also people who cannot get over my dad doesn't respect what I do for a living, which is a little limited as a story, as an emotional arc, unless you're digging really deep. Finding Nemo feels like it comes out of a very honest place. And I also think all these early Pixar movies are really defined by these guys as young fathers. you know overgrown children people who went into the field of animation suddenly crossing this line of like I have a kid and now I'm kind of like dealing with existential terror of like wait a second I have to be a grown-up how do I raise kids properly what what do I feel about how I was raised what is the world I want them to live in and also they're in this insane industry working on these movies that are so intense that take so long and they're all kind of fighting this like concern of Am I not spending enough time with my family?

55:14Right, right, right. And it makes sense.

55:15David Sims:All these workaholics, like, yeah. To give joy to all the children of the world, they must miss their own child's dance recital.

55:23Griffin Newman:Right, right, right. Soccer practice. So, Andrew Stanton, I'm opening the dossier. Please do. Born in December 1965 in Massachusetts.

55:32David Sims:Heard of it?

55:33Griffin Newman:Yeah.

55:33David Sims:He has a couple voices in this movie, but one of them is the Boston Lobsters. There you go.

55:39Griffin Newman:Born in Wellesley. Uh-huh. Moved to Rockport Because Whatever Apparently his dad was sort of like Well, these two are sort of fancy I don't like how rich and white it is here His father, Ron Stanton Was an MIT graduate Founded a company called Highcore Which the New Yorker says Did confidential radar work for the Department of Defense Cool Andrew says that Ron was a classic authoritarian figure Away from home a lot Kind of tight-lipped Gloria, the mom, puts it this way. When Andrew had done something wrong, his father never needed to say anything. He'd just come and stand in Andrew's room silently and Andrew would tell him everything.

56:19Griffin Newman:I mean, to what we were just saying. Whereas Gloria is a fun mom. She was an actress who gave up acting to have a family and she loved, you know, to entertain and be fun. All of this makes a ton of sense. Yeah, he lives at the intersection of weapons, tech, and acting and fun.

56:36David Sims:Right. That sort of Pixar is right in the middle. To your point, Becca, what a relief that the movies aren't about this. Yeah, about like my parents. Right, right. My dad doesn't respect me being a plumber.

56:47Griffin Newman:So, Gloria, this is all from like a New Yorker profile of him. I think for WALL-E is when they did this.

56:52David Sims:There's also an incredible New Yorker profile when John Carter comes out that we will talk about extensively in that episode.

56:58Griffin Newman:Oh, maybe it's for John Carter because it's 2011.

56:59David Sims:It's right at the fulcrum point of what's going to happen when this movie is released.

57:03Griffin Newman:So, his dad introduced him to science fiction, including the John Carter novels. he was a rocket scientist. He had pulp sci-fi novels throughout the house. He dragged him to like every single sci-fi movie. It's not, the culture stuff isn't just coming from the mom. Stanton said, basically, he was a precocious little boy with like undiagnosed ADD who just like, wasn't quite like a child prodigy, but was clearly like very energetic and creative and like doing lots of stuff kind of like without much encouragement. He would make little skits with a Super 8 camera. He had a show he did with his friends called The Silly Show.

57:39Griffin Newman:Sounds pretty good.

57:40David Sims:When you watch all the vintage Pixar special features, because they were really at the forefront of DVD bonus material and showing so much of, with every release, like, here's more about how Pixar works and pulling back the curtain, not just on the technical process. Which is so classic Walt. That's so wonderful world of Disney. This is part of why Lasseter gets pushed into the is he the new Uncle Walt position. But you watch those things, and I'm just going to say this, Andrew Stanton is charismatic in a way that none of those other guys are. That's interesting. Andrew Stanton is like... He's got a little more, like, personality.

58:13David Sims:He is just clearly, like, more of a people person versus, like, Lasseter had always felt was kind of doing an impression of an Uncle Walt.

58:21Griffin Newman:Yes.

58:21David Sims:And Pete Docter, by his own admission, is a pretty introverted guy. Right. He seems like a pretty reserved kind of guy. He's a kind of classic animator. Right. I want to just, like, draw a thing and slide it over to you rather than talk. And Andrew Stanton, I think, did a fair amount of, like, school acting and such when he was growing up, which I also think comes across in his movies. And The Silly Show. And The Silly Show.

58:42Griffin Newman:That he's a little bit more of a performer. He went to University of Hartford for one year, but then transferred to CalArts, Griffin's alum. I dropped out, but yes. So, obviously, he's part of the sort of legendary program there. A113. That you just, you know, invoked earlier. But also, I mean,

58:59David Sims:that classroom, that era is also like, I believe, Steven Hillenburg who creates SpongeBob. Love that guy. Brad Bird is there with them at that same time, even though he comes to Pixar later. I mean, it's like 10 people in that year who went on to make an outsized cultural impact in animation.

59:16Griffin Newman:He had been dating his now wife, Julie, basically since he was 15 years old. She went to Georgetown. They got married right after they graduated, basically settled in Los Angeles. Stanton worked on a sex education film starring Martin Short for Croyer Films, animated The Sperm. Is this The Journey of Me? Is this coming all the way back around to look who's talking?

59:39David Sims:I think so. I believe there's an attraction that at one point was part of Epcot called The Journey of Me. The Making of Me. There we go. I've seen this. So yeah, it's a sex education short that played in the wonders of the human body part of Epcot.

59:52Griffin Newman:It was a wonders of life pavilion. Fair enough. Like many CalArts students, he wanted to work at Disney. He was rejected three times. But then he meets John Lasseter. And he had, I guess, some student films. I had these student films that were luckily entertaining enough that they showed some at festivals that also had like Luxo and Tin Toy, the early Lasseter shorts playing at them and they kind of hit it off. My favorite's the bicycle one. Red's Dream. Red's Dream. Always liked that one. Yeah. It's a freaky clown.

1:00:21David Sims:Stan's stuff is really funny too. Yeah. He also, I mean, I don't, timeline might be off on this, but I know he worked on the Ralph Bakshi Mighty Mouse cartoon.

1:00:29Griffin Newman:I mean, the sex ed thing was, I think, also Bakshi Studios or maybe, or I can't remember. It's so funny to think of Bakshi making something for, like, Epcot goers.

1:00:39David Sims:This is this weird era where Bakshi's, like, trying to play a little more mainstream, but all the stuff he makes is just kind of subtly off and weird. Not that I think he's trying to be transgressive, but that he can't be normal. There's something inherently degenerate, like, coursing through. That Mighty Mouse cartoon is like that and is fascinating. I highly recommend looking it up. Stanton, I think, had writing credits on the whole season and was pretty involved in that. Can you watch the shorts? Are those available? They must be somewhere, but Mighty Mouse is one of those things where I could not even tell you who has the rights.

1:01:12David Sims:I'm like, are the Mighty Mouse rights owned by, like, Crest Toothpaste through some weird Uh, conglomerations.

1:01:20Griffin Newman:So he is hired as Pixar's second ever animator. Yeah. Uh, obviously Pixar has been taken under the wing of Steve Jobs at that point. Andrew, uh, happy-go-lucky, they say. Mm-hmm. Uh, relied on humor to get by. Uh, he works on Toy Story, obviously. He's, that's his first Oscar nomination. He's one of the many credited writers of Toy Story.

1:01:40David Sims:So let me just unpack this a little bit. Because A, I think he is, he's, as I said, he's a very charismatic guy. He's very sociable. There's a story I'll tell later in this episode that's kind of a thing that makes him as a filmmaker. But he is an incredibly anxious, somewhat cynical person. He talks about like the constant battle between those two forces within himself and trying to probably the battle between like his mom and his dad, you know, being someone who is avuncular and outgoing and sociable, but is constantly kind of like wrestling with these concerns inside of his head. Everyone at Pixar says that like Woody is him.

1:02:21David Sims:That's interesting.

1:02:22Griffin Newman:He says, Stanton, he says he's Sid. I can read you the quote. So he, Ben. He came up with the character. He was the guy who wrote Sid, essentially.

1:02:33David Sims:And that Sid is the reflection of what he was like as a teenager. He liked to break his toys and then like remake them into new things. Right, as creative projects. Right. Which is back to this point I'm making of like Sid doesn't know he's a fucking villain in Toy Story. Andrew Stanton's always said this. He's like, Sid's a creative kid who just hasn't gotten to art school yet. He doesn't have an outlet, you know, the kind of like myth making here is within Pixar. They're sort of like, I guess we need to bring in an outside screenwriter, a Hollywood screenwriter. A number of people take passes at Toy Story in years of development, including a similarly normal person, Joss Whedon.

1:03:13David Sims:One of the fake Coens, I can't, it's not Etan Cohen, but maybe it's the other Joel Cohen spelled differently. There were like four or five credited screenwriters on Toy Story who were mostly - Joel Cohen.

1:03:24Griffin Newman:There we go. Yes, yes.

1:03:25David Sims:Mostly other kind of like Hollywood spec script, punch-up rewrite guys. And they kept having people come in. They'd pay them to work on the script for, like, a couple months. They'd fix a couple things, but other things wouldn't be fixed. They had never really solved it. Disney wasn't giving them more budget. And the sort of, like, myth-making part of this is that Andrew Stanton goes, like, can I just, like, try and see if I can do a pass? And Stanton sort of holds away with the script and is the guy who, like, finally fixes everything and cracks everything. Right. And makes it cohesive. and Pixar realizes like, oh, fuck, we have a screenwriter here.

1:03:58David Sims:We have a guy in-house who knows how to do this stuff, especially after the infamous Black Friday screening. Sure. Where there was the very dark, very cynical version of the movie after... Where Woody was like an asshole originally. Yes. Katzenberg had kept saying like, I think there's a future with edgier, funnier, darker, more adult animated movies. And little did he know. He basically gets there with Shrek. Shrek is what he always wanted to make. But he kept pushing Pixar past their natural instincts. And so there's the screening they show of the story reels right before it goes to animation.

1:04:33David Sims:That's like a disaster where Disney's going to pull the plug on the movie because they're like, this lead character is like a complete asshole. This movie is just unpleasant to watch. And they beg for three days to rework the film. And I think Stanton does a lot of the story heavy lifting. And they do the just like, fuck it. Let's get back to the exact movie we want to make. they green light that conditionally and the film ends up happening as it is. But there is this kind of like Stanton's attitude mirrors Woody very much of constantly being frustrated but wanting to put forward the face of like I got this under control.

1:05:08David Sims:I'm looking out for all of you.

1:05:10Griffin Newman:Yeah. Well, that makes sense. Yeah. So Jim Morris says he's the best sort of genius for story structure. Yes. That's one Pixar guy. Michael Arndt, that guy. Yes. says that he's kind of good at being harsh in a story. Like he'll say the thing that's not working or whatever. Like he's more blunt.

1:05:30David Sims:I saw him say in an interview that that was a big thing from Steve Jobs, who, you know, in this era is still very hands-on with Pixar. That he was just like, people would get really turned off by how blunt Steve Jobs was, but he was just kind of ruthless in identifying what is the problem and what is the thing that needs to get done.

1:05:50Griffin Newman:Right. Yeah. Some of the other credits before Nemo, obviously, he's also a co-director and writer on Bugs Life. Yeah. He's also the voice of Bug Zapper, Bug One, and Singing Grasshopper Two.

1:06:01David Sims:Uh-huh. In the Disney parks, there is an attraction that is now closed called Tough to Be a Bug that took place inside the tree in Animal Kingdom and had a giant animatronic hopper that they didn't need to remove when Kevin Spacey got canceled because Kevin Spacey refused to do the recording. Andrew Stanton did it instead. Andrew Stanton does a weirdly good Kevin Spacey impression. And that was already one of the scariest things in Disney parks without Kevin even doing the voice. True, true. And it has been replaced by a horrible Zootopia attraction. Interesting. Tough to be an animal. He's the voice?

1:06:38David Sims:Oh, sorry. No, I was just going to say, co-director in animation can mean a number of different things. Sometimes it means that two people are directing a film equally. in this era of Pixar, it's sort of the junior director thing. Lasseter taking him on as co-director for A Bug's Life was sort of to train him to be able to make his own film. But he is, by all accounts, kind of the main screenwriter of A Bug's Life. And also, when Toy Story 2 is saved from direct-to-video and reworked, he is the guy who does that. So across those first three movies, he is, like, the main writer guy.

1:07:12Griffin Newman:Right, right. So Toy Story 2 has got the credit. Of course, he's the voice of Hammond, Buzz Lightyear, Star Command, The Adventure Begins. Can't say I knew that.

1:07:19David Sims:Yeah, that's just in the opening. This is the thing. He's a really good performer, and he would often do sound-alike voices for when the stars didn't want to come do something like a ride or a commercial or whatever it is. He is the voice of Zurg canonically in Toy Story 2. Yes. That is him. He's the real Zurg voice, obviously with a bunch of modulators on him.

1:07:38Griffin Newman:So, Finding Nemo's been swimming around in his head. Interesting use of words there. It's about fish. Since Toy Story, he says, he'd always wanted to the ocean. He was fixated on a child on his dentist's water fish tank. When he was a child, he would look at the fish tank. Which was a weird way to see humans. What's the movie about? What makes me care? He says he's in a walk with his five-year-old son, Ben, and he has the terrible anxiety that he realized that his terrible anxiety was making him a bad father. That he kept being like, careful.

1:08:09David Sims:That he was pulling him from running into the street and all the sort of things. and he went like, you should do that. Yeah, yeah. But it was the intensity of his worry that he felt, right? And he was like, here's my day. I have a, you know, a day alone with my son and I'm going to have no good lasting memories of this because I spent the entire day concerned about everything he was doing and not actually connecting to him. And that's the real, like, germ of the idea. I want to make a movie about that.

1:08:38Griffin Newman:He also had seen an early cut of Lion King. and apparently remembers just slamming on it. Says like sort of shows what I know. He hated the idea of the sort of circle of life of like, oh, we're all just part of this grand chain and we're all, you know, it's all helpful. He likes the Bambi idea of like, it's a real scary predatory world. And he's like, Nemo is set in the Bambi world.

1:09:01David Sims:This is another thing that I really give him specifically credit for changing in the language of American movies because I really think it starts with Toy Story. animated movies in which characters talk like grownups right where you're not dealing with kind of like mythical representational voices of reason cosmic evils and so much of the comedy in this movie is just that it's funny that two fishes are talking in this casual a way and that they are so recognizable as personality types but i think right he's he's speaking to a very specific human anxiety rather than kind of like a larger just so stories type of lesson.

1:09:41Yeah, without tipping too far into the like shark tail, like, hey, I'm swimming here, which I'm just going to guess they say. Right.

1:09:48Griffin Newman:If they don't say that, it missed opportunity. Ackerman fucked up. They do sound like grownups, but not in that DreamWorks way, which is a different thing. Yes.

1:09:56David Sims:I think I think it's that the DreamWorks movies start really iterating on other things in pop culture in a kind of postmodern, metatextual, self-referential kind of way. And what Stan sort of identifies is like an audience will laugh if a character suddenly reminds you of a type of person you know. Not an archetype in sitcoms, you know, but like a type of person with a specificity. Yeah. so

1:10:29Griffin Newman:finding Nemo he settles on clownfish because he sees like a coffee table book and finds them arresting I mean it's obvious like it's a great idea

1:10:38David Sims:he saw a picture of two clownfish coming out of an anemone and it looked like they were sort of hiding and he was like and it looks like a parent and a child he presents an hour long

1:10:47Griffin Newman:pitch to Lasseter Lasseter is a long time scuba diver because he was hugging the fish down there too unfortunately and Lasseter says you had me at fish yeah And then he's like, how about a hawk? The other part of that story is... Bring it in, buddy! Anyone else want to join?

1:11:05David Sims:Stanton the Worry Wirt planned an hour-long pitch that involved him doing all the voices, the sound effects, and he had audio cues.

1:11:12Griffin Newman:Lester's like, fish, that's a great idea. We can sell fish.

1:11:15David Sims:Yeah, right.

1:11:15Griffin Newman:Truly.

1:11:16David Sims:They're colorful. Right. We also can't stress enough how big SpongeBob was at the time. Everyone loved underwater. We were underwater crazy. Let's call out, though, it's a little bit of parallel thinking. Like, SpongeBob premieres in 99. There's four years in between. But the lead time on animation is...

1:11:34Griffin Newman:This is around 2000, I think, when this movie goes into production. Yeah, yeah.

1:11:38David Sims:SpongeBob was immediately a hit, like right out of the box. I think that was a little bit of them getting lucky with timing. Another thing, I think I saw Jim Morris say this, that was unique about this movie, is so often they would come up with a big idea at Pixar, and then they would all sort of brainstorm together, and then they'd hire an outside screenwriter or three or four people would noodle on it and they'd keep iterating and adding things to it until they finally got to something vaguely resembling a script. Stan literally just sat down and wrote a script for this one. It is like right after A Bug's Life.

1:12:09Griffin Newman:It's different from the...

1:12:10David Sims:Yeah, I know there's other people now,

1:12:11Griffin Newman:like other people credited and all that,

1:12:13David Sims:but he had a screenplay. But in a kind of complete vision way, it gets changed in regards, but it was like, here's the arc of my story, here's what it's about, here are the major beats. beginning to end. However, the problem was the tank story.

1:12:27Griffin Newman:Like, he had the Search for Nemo stuff, I think, much more set. But the tank story kept derailing the narrative is how the other Pixar guys put it in this sort of initial pitch. Right. How does that not feel like you're cutting away to an inactive thing? Exactly, right. The original script, also, the loss of Marlon's wife was communicated with brief flashbacks in her spurs through the film. And only in the third, we talked about this on this podcast before, only in the third act do you see that it was like this barracuda attack. or whatever. Allow me to restate this. Please do it now. Because it's like, basically, the audiences were like, what the fuck, right?

1:12:58Griffin Newman:Like, why is he so stressed out?

1:12:59David Sims:It is the most important thing in Andrew Stanton's career and it swings back in a different way in John Carter in a way we need to talk about. So this is the thing that needs to be established. He, as a guy who now, in the time between Toy Story and Finding Nemo, has gotten really serious about screenwriting and read the books and studied other movies and really tried to understand screenwriting as an art form, was obsessed with movies that are able to do this as a storytelling device. Isn't that fun when a movie can kind of slowly tease out information and backfill it in multiple flashbacks? And so he just, that was the shape he conceived in his head of the movie starts with Nemo waking Marlon up, his first day of school, and yada, yada, yada.

1:13:41David Sims:And across the film, you start to get these flashbacks until you finally at the end realize, oh, his wife was killed by a barracuda. All the other eggs were destroyed. Nemo's the only son he has left. And they would play the story reels for audiences, which are basically, it's usually, sometimes it's Pixar animators, sometimes it's the final cast actors and the voices, lightly animated storyboards, usually with temp music, just so before they do the expensive part of actually starting animation, they can feel the flow of the movie. And they play it and people are just like, we hate Marlon. He sucks.

1:14:18David Sims:This guy drives me crazy. And by the time they explain why he has this level of neuroses, it's too late. The audience isn't on board. And he keeps trying to crack it and he can't. And then he's just finally like, what if I just put all this stuff at the top?

1:14:31Griffin Newman:Yeah. And it makes sense. I just do it. It's also really helpful for me because I can just not watch that with my daughter. Just skip right past it.

1:14:38David Sims:But as you said, he was like, everyone was concerned that's too scary. You can't front load it in a movie. And he said, like, that's Bambi. Bambi exists and Bambi survives as a beloved film. Right. I think you need to like look the scary thing in the eye. And the second he did that, the movie worked. The other thing that happens is. Dory.

1:14:58Griffin Newman:I don't know if you know if that's what you were going to say, but to him, it's Dory. What are you going to say?

1:15:02David Sims:There was a different actor cast. Well, we'll get to that. Let's get to that. Okay. The other thing for him is Dory. But I just want to say he has a TED talk around the time of John Carter where he shares the storytelling lesson. And he learned there of not trying to out clever yourself as a storyteller, that it's important for audiences to have the emotional information they need to understand what's going on with the characters. That makes sense. And very often, if you try to be smart or stylish in your sort of devices, you actually it's cutting your nose. You're alienating the audience. Correct.

1:15:36You could just as easily because with this from the very beginning, you're like Marlon has suffered. Yes. you know you're rooting for him

1:15:44Griffin Newman:it's an incredibly devastating thing and you it works perfectly it is so Elizabeth Perkins crushing it

1:15:50David Sims:that's the other thing

1:15:51Griffin Newman:like Elizabeth Perkins is great

1:15:53David Sims:within 30 seconds you understand the dynamic of their marriage a scary thing happens you see his anxiety like it's just and it also introduces you to like in Finding Nemo and in the ocean it's like danger at every turn these fish's lives are very precarious like we're going to encounter a lot of scary creatures There are actual stakes from the beginning. It's not just that this kid is lost. It's like the mother dies, as do hundreds of eggs. At least hundreds of fish every day die in the ocean.

1:16:23Griffin Newman:Yeah. Dory, to him, kind of takes the film to another level. She bridges the two main characters. He was inspired by the structure of the novel Cold Mountain for this. So Dory's the Renee Zellweger character? That's what I assume he means by that. David Reynolds who's a Conan writer and had worked on other Pixar movies and Bob Peterson who Mr. Ray right who hadn't written a movie for Pixar yet but it's in the mix but it's one of their main story guys exactly like those are the other credited screenwriters William H. Macy first cast as Marlon yes they wanted someone with a lighter touch is the cited reason as Stan has always put it but this is never revealed until there's like a Pixar book that reveals it right

1:17:04David Sims:so Stan always talked about the fact that they had originally cast a dramatic actor and it felt like it made the movie too heavy. He cast a guy who was funny but comes from a dramatic background and that he felt like he was playing the anxiety too real and too weighty and it fought the comedy of the movie. And he always kind of in a gentlemanly way never named who the actor was, but then said when we brought in Albert Brooks, he didn't need to play anxiety. That's his natural state and he could riff all these jokes on top of it and it worked. The book, The Pixar Touch, is the one that finally puts William H.

1:17:39David Sims:Macy as the name. It's never really been verified, but it's basically been commonly accepted. That's who it was. It makes a lot of sense to be like Andrew Stanton thinks, well, wouldn't like William H. Macy's character from Fargo in an animated movie be the correct version of this. But that's a very dark movie where you kind of want to watch that guy suffer.

1:18:01Griffin Newman:Totally. Um, Albert Brooks had, was making The In-Laws. Mm-hmm. Comes out the same summer. Did a bunch of sessions around The In-Laws, essentially. He said he did 11 sessions of four hours each. That's all he had to do. Yeah. It doesn't sound like that much to me.

1:18:20David Sims:The other thing he said is that, uh, he basically would never, uh, read what was written on the page, but then would improvise for, like, 20 minutes. He's really good. He's like, you can't get him to say the same thing twice. he doesn't want to do line readings but he because he's a writer and a filmmaker in his own right would look and be like what's the thing that needs to be conveyed in terms of story information in this line of dialogue and then now I will give you 20 iterations of the funniest ways that could happen he's a really funny guy and and good governor yes and a good

1:18:56Griffin Newman:what's he becoming secretary of labor or commerce or something in the country in which he was born and raised we assume we assume

1:19:05David Sims:yeah

1:19:05Griffin Newman:what if he's a dirty ruski

1:19:08David Sims:what if that was cut out

1:19:09Griffin Newman:of Ellen McKay he's becoming president he could be like Canadian or something a Canadian's in the room

1:19:13David Sims:with us right now a Canadian's in the room

1:19:14Griffin Newman:with us right now hi Becca hi okay Brooks comes up with the clown thing he comes up with the joke like that he can't do jokes yeah that was Brooks' idea right Stanton's watching Ellen the sitcom yes much better than the talk show late 90s yeah And she kind of, you know, the Ellen delivery thing of like, she changes her mind five times into a sentence.

1:19:38David Sims:One line where she changed the topic seven times and turned to his wife and said, I think that story. Now, Dory was written to be male. Right. And speaking of this kind of like interesting coming in and saying, how do we break the mold of what a Pixar movie is a little bit? Right. That he felt like Toy Story, the two Toy Stories and Monsters Inc. were all buddy pictures. all had Randy Newman scores, all had a kind of similar design language sense of humor, and that he really felt like, we need to start stretching out what these movies can be so it doesn't start to become formulaic. And I think there's a way in which you can see Finding Nemo as a buddy picture because it is Dory and Nemo on this journey together, but the nature of Dory as a character prevents it from feeling like that.

1:20:26I think they're going on a sort of buddy journey. And I think it's like one of my favorite things about the movie, especially in the context of what Pixar was before, is I love when the goofy one, funny one, stupid one is a girl. I think that was really missing in a lot of kids entertainment as the time.

1:20:47Griffin Newman:Because it was seen as like retrograde at some point or like and they stopped doing it. Girls need to be like perfect love interest. Yeah, for the girl to be the hilarious, comic relief, silly, stupid one is so awesome. And I still love that when that happens in like an ensemble sitcom or something like today because it still is semi-rare. And so Dory, I think, is like huge.

1:21:10David Sims:I give him super credit for just being like, oh, Ellen would work for this, even if it is not how I conceived this. Obviously, you know, Pixar is famous for when they picked a subject being like, let's do a ton of research and let's find story discoveries from learning about the real thing. And certainly they did a lot of that with A Bug's Life. He replicated that model here. He found the thing about certain fish have like five second memories. I feel like that was already a joke about goldfish. The old goldfish memory thing. And he was like, that's kind of an interesting character challenge.

1:21:42Griffin Newman:George's memory loss.

1:21:43David Sims:And it could so easily be that's a character you meet for five minutes in one of many segments of the movie. Yeah, it's like one bit in the movie. Right. He gives himself like a real fucking tough challenge to how do you make that the other character in the dynamic and not have it be annoying. You know who's pretty funny? Ellen DeGeneres?

1:21:58Griffin Newman:Dory.

1:21:59David Sims:Dory rules. Dory's amazing. It's a great bit.

1:22:02Griffin Newman:And Ellen is so funny in this movie. It's crazy.

1:22:04David Sims:So funny. But like, how does it not to write that character and perform that character where it's not frustrating that she's the obstacle in the movie? Because the actual goal of the film is get to Nemo. But then the person who's joining him in that goal. She's kind of not helping. Has her own dilemma. Yeah. It makes it all the more satisfying when she can push through things. It makes every like win she has like so much more heartening. I mean, without her, Marlon is a pain. Totally.

1:22:33Griffin Newman:So what were you going to say, Becca? Oh, just not to skip ahead, but one of the big moments that breaks my heart. Like as a kid, when he abandons her.

1:22:43David Sims:But to your point, Becca, to have this character be female, to have it be an entirely aromantic relationship between male and female adult characters. They do not. I'm going to say this on the record. Marlon and Dory do not. I regret even saying that. Not only that, but you don't even want to ship them. You don't want to ship them. Not really. This is a great point. A nightmare couple. You don't want to ship them. It's closer to being a surrogate parenting relationship. Yes. Sort of. Which is why it helps Marlon have a narrative within the film, an emotional arc of he's in trying to keep Dory safe, realizing the things he's fucked up with Nemo.

1:23:22Griffin Newman:He's realizing his parenting mistakes, but he is also, Dory is also helping him overcome, like, you know, like his anxiety, his sort of his executive function problem of kind of like never making choice just keep swimming man like sometimes you need someone who's just like kind of positive energy we gotta keep going you know like he'd never make it to Nemo without that energy

1:23:42David Sims:no and even with her condition there's the fact that she is an adult means that he talks to her a different way than he talks to Nemo

1:23:49Griffin Newman:right he can't be quite as patronizing

1:23:51David Sims:and when she pushes back on him he listens a little bit more yeah he learns to trust yes

1:23:59Griffin Newman:Dory rules Dory's good. Ellen's great. Yeah. I love to order her lunch. Just that's what I love to do. I mean, this is... And get it right every time.

1:24:09David Sims:This is the movie that saves her career. It transforms her career. The talk show premieres this fall after this movie is released. So obviously it was already in the works.

1:24:20Griffin Newman:Yeah, but she has the failed second sitcom. Yes. 2001 to 2002, which was called The Ellen Show. Yeah. Which is like, that's the one where it's like, she is gay. Like, it's like, it's like baked into the show versus the first sitcom. Like, that is a revelation that comes late in the show. Yeah. And that had, like, Jim Gaffigan in it and stuff and Martin Mullin. It was like a big CBS show and it flopped. Yeah. And it was kind of the thing, like, right, was Ellen kind of just, you know, she had Ellen. She had the show. Like, she was important culturally, but like, that's kind of it.

1:24:55David Sims:They were putting her in movies. She's in Ed TV. Mr. Wrong is obviously a disaster, but she's in Ed TV. She's funny in Ed TV.

1:24:59Griffin Newman:she has a line to think about all the time can I say it? it's so funny it's just a good line it's like Rob Reiner comes in and he's like the mean bot the mean seat owner network guy and there's something to do about he's like if this happens I'll get you more money and she's like can we get coffee filters we've been using a yarmulke and it feels like something Ellen might have made up because it's such a specific image that they just have this soggy yarmulke yes

1:25:29David Sims:Anyway.

1:25:29Griffin Newman:That's awesome. Sorry.

1:25:30David Sims:She was so big in the 90s. Yeah. And the arc of what happens to her is really fascinating to study now because there was just like years of speculation of she's gay, right? Right. We're just not saying it. Right. There's like short haired lady with pants. There's the Larry Sanders episode that happens like two years before she comes out, where the whole premise is Rip Torn's character is pressuring Larry to be like, if we could get Ellen coming out, that would be a big boon for the show. So Ellen's kind of winking at it within that show. And within the episode, I feel like they never say it. They never put a name to it.

1:26:08David Sims:And then the twist in that episode is that her and Larry sleep together and he's like, I think maybe she's not. but much like the Seinfeld contest episode they're never saying the word so it was enough in the ether that she's even making jokes about the fact that she's not acknowledging it and then they do an episode where she comes out the character is gonna be gay and Ellen's gonna come out it's the front page of fucking Time Magazine the puppy episode yep I'm gay with her sitting crisscross applesauce

1:26:37Griffin Newman:no she was doing

1:26:38David Sims:a little fun fun kneel oh you're right Becca no she's doing a gayer stance.

1:26:46Griffin Newman:Ellen, she's the best.

1:26:48David Sims:I love Ellen. That episode is huge in the ratings. Yep, I'm gay makes headlines. Right. It's one of these things where she gets this huge bump of visibility and then everyone sort of applauds her and then immediately is like, but obviously we can't sell car commercials on a gay show. All the sponsors go away. The listeners. That's a good point. Yeah. The viewership drops.

1:27:09Griffin Newman:I'm just going to get canceled.

1:27:10David Sims:The show's basically canceled within a year of her coming out. Yeah. And the attitude is like, thank you for your bravery, but obviously you're not part of the popular culture anymore. And then she talks about for years fighting to be like hosting the Emmys or hosting SNL when she didn't have anything to promote. Trying to just get herself back out there as a comedian after all the offers had dried up.

1:27:33Griffin Newman:Ellen, she ran a bookshop? Yes. Was it a bookshop? What? Ellen. True? Ellen Morgan, the character in Ellen. Oh, okay. Wasn't it a bookshop? Yeah.

1:27:43David Sims:Yes. It was called By the Book.

1:27:44Griffin Newman:Funny.

1:27:45David Sims:But this is the movie that launches the second half of her career. That reintroduces her in an undeniable kind of way. Does she make a lot of movies after this?

1:27:55Griffin Newman:No. Because she's doing the show. Yeah. So the only movie she made after this in which she's not playing herself. Is Finding Dory. Is this film called Finding Dory. Yeah. In which she played Dory. She did play Dory. And that's it. And she's never made one since. She did more specials. She did some stand-up. Yeah. Like any movies? No movies. Yeah. It's just a story from then on. I think about that tweet all the time. Becca, you know what I'm talking about? Of like the loss of her, of her talk show. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Where she's like, she would have extracted. The balance of the universe is off.

1:28:26Griffin Newman:Right. She would have extracted everything usable out of Hawk Tua and like discarded her like a carcass. Like Hawk Tua got to like have a whole year because Ellen wasn't there to just kind of be like, here is Hawk Tua. We've presented her to you. We've asked all the questions and now she can go. Yeah. The like Ellen extraction machine. Yeah, right. Like that's how it used to be. It was like, there's a funny video of you ordering a donut in a weird way.

1:28:49David Sims:Come talk to Ellen for an hour and then never be seen again. But it's also just fascinating that Ellen went from being like, Hollywood like threw me out. They like said, thank you for your bravery. And then like closed the door on me. And then she's the voice of one of the most famous and beloved animated characters of all time. Two of the highest grossing animated films in history. Right. And becomes like the voice of reason for every mom in America. Like has a 20 year run of just being like she kind of controls this like sliver of the national conversation of just like I'm deciding which viral people get elevated.

1:29:24David Sims:I'm deciding like what the new style and throw pillows are at Target. Yeah, it is interesting that the Ellen show starts and then this rise of viral videos and social media starts and she immediately becomes the curator of that for moms. Yes. And dancing. She invented dancing. There's an Ellen bit in the famous J Nirvana sequence, yes? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I've heard you're afraid of clowns. No, Ellen, that's not true. And then the clown pops up out of the jack-in-the-box. So there's a movie. There's a movie. You're right.

1:30:02Griffin Newman:Is she coming back? Because I know she had like a recent-ish special in the last five years. She did a documentary about gorillas. David, much like Alec Baldwin, she said goodbye to public life.

1:30:12David Sims:On her last tour, she said, this is the last time you'll ever see me. It wasn't her last. I didn't watch the special.

1:30:17Griffin Newman:Wasn't the special kind of like, yeah, I'm rich. I live in a spaceship. Oh, that's the one that had the claptor that went for like two full minutes. Yes. Oh. Yeah. It looked like it was edited. Right. She said something very self-congratulatory and then they and they kept it all in the edit of the special and everyone claps for like an hour.

1:30:35David Sims:It's also her addressing the mean Ellen stuff. It was like around that time she starts doing all this press and it becomes very clear that she never, ever got over the anger of how everyone in the industry respond to her coming out. that even when finding Nemo and the show bring her back to prominence, she kind of held on to this spite forever of like, everyone commended me for doing a thing that was culturally important and also every job dried up. It's just fascinating, like this movie, so much hinging on that choice to cast her.

1:31:08Griffin Newman:It was the right choice. Yeah. But as we sort of said, like every casting decision in this movie is pretty spot on. even young Alexander Gould. He's quite good. The voice of Nemo. He's the kid from Weeds. That's right. He was the kid on Weeds. I remember that. He had a little bowl cut. His mom was dealing weed. He looked like a little Nemo. Nemo's just a round little guy with a pair of eyes. Weeds. Talk about a show that its entire premise is defunct now. Yes. She's like, I'm selling weed. I'm going to get in trouble with the law. Yeah. You know, like, oh, now the cops are after me because I sell joints.

1:31:42Griffin Newman:Now you can just go to the store. Now you can just go to the store. Yeah.

1:31:55David Sims:David? Yes? I know what your problem is. Uh-oh. You're getting too much sleep. All right. I have trouble to sleep.

1:32:03Griffin Newman:What can I do?

1:32:04David Sims:Well, this is a lifelong issue, but now you also got a house full of handfuls. It makes the sleep you can get all the more precious, does it not? Of course. Of course. and you know,

1:32:14Griffin Newman:what's the most important thing about sleep, Griffin?

1:32:17David Sims:Most important thing about sleep, sawing logs, counting sheep, honkshu, honkshu. I would say closing your eyes,

1:32:24Griffin Newman:wearing a sleeping cap. These things are all very important, but no, it's the mattress atop which you sleep. And I have a Lisa mattress thanks to their wonderful partnership with us, I believe. I'm sleeping on a king size Lisa mattress. I want to make sure I say exactly the brand I have. I believe it's the Legend. Oh. I think that's what it's called. Yes. The Hybrid Chill. Maybe it's just the Hybrid. I'm not sure if I got the chill. I got the chill because I'm a hot sleeper. I want to chill out. So the whole thing with Lisa is they've got all kinds of, you know, shapes and sizes for you, right?

1:33:04Griffin Newman:You know, if you want a little more firm, you want a little more soft. It's the best hack to improve your sleep. It's to address what you're sleeping on. I, for a long time, was on a less good mattress that wasn't as big. I switched to a King. I switched to a very nice Lisa mattress. You're a tall man. You have a tall wife. It is one of the best single life decisions I ever made in terms of just improving my quality of life. You genuinely seem so relaxed even just recounting this. I love to be in my bed now. And like, of course, I always like bed. Bed's fun. Bed is fun. Yeah, great to be in bed.

1:33:38But now I'm like, hmm, how long till I can get my bed?

1:33:41Griffin Newman:In fact, we have to record an episode after this. And I'm like, how many hours from bed?

1:33:46David Sims:Bed is great. And, you know, we've covered some of the worst beds in movies on this podcast. Will Dormer falling asleep on a dock or a pile of garbage. Rooster Cogburn, Bed of Ropes. You don't want to be like those guys. Those guys didn't have happy ends. You want to be like a king, a legendary king sleeping on a Lisa.

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1:35:24Griffin Newman:This episode is brought to you by Starbucks That is fire! Whoa, that's good This might be the drink of the summer Okay, I like this one too, I'm rocking with it, okay Try it for yourself Starbucks Refreshers Concentrates are coming home Find them in the coffee aisle and make it yours

1:35:47Griffin Newman:My Nemo begins with Nemo's mom getting chumped to bits by a barracuda. What do you think? A plus? Good?

1:35:53David Sims:I mean, I do think it's an incredible opening. It also felt jarring as a Pixar obsessive seeing this opening weekend. They played Knick Knack, which was an older short, being reissued. Is that the one in the snow globe with the jackhammer? Yes. And the sexy lady in the other snow globe. But because of Woke, the sexy lady in the snow globe used to have big naturals. and I think when they re-released it for Nemo, they made her a little more flat-chested. And I have been writing angry letters to Disney every day of my life since then. I want my snow globes horny!

1:36:28Griffin Newman:Those early Pixar movies, right, that's what they would do. They would show the old shorts. They would alternate because there was not as... Jerry's Game and For the Birds. They didn't have the young kids making their own shorts

1:36:41David Sims:within Pixar yet. as consistent a pipeline. So sometimes they'd be like, we don't have a short ready. Let's throw up one of the old guys. Get Nicknack out of the fucking box.

1:36:50Griffin Newman:Nicknack rules. They never did Red Stream though. Cowards. They didn't. That's the one they never put on there. No kid wants to see that on a big screen. It's a sad movie. The clown's really scary. Oh, yeah. It's a bit creepy. And it's in like a black void. Yeah, that's why I liked it.

1:37:03David Sims:It's about a fucking unicycle, Ben. It's a movie about a unicycle who's sad that he can't get a clown to sit on his face. That's insane. That sounds like a parody of a Pixar concept.

1:37:12Griffin Newman:He wants to juggle, right? He wants to learn how to juggle with his two little petals. Yeah, but there is a clown in it and it is weird.

1:37:18David Sims:Where does he sit?

1:37:19Griffin Newman:Well, there's only one place to sit

1:37:21David Sims:on a unicycle. Find the lie. But Knickknack plays, then we got our fucking jumpin' look-so-junior guy. And then the movie, like, just kind of cold open, straight, like, mid-dialogue. I remember that feeling jarring. It does feel like a tonal shift against the other Pixar movies that ease you in to a reality. Yeah. I mean, the opening line of this movie is, wow, right? Wow. You're seeing... And you're already saying that because you're looking at this digitally animated ocean. That's also quite gorgeous.

1:37:55Griffin Newman:I saw this film by myself. I remember. I was here on vacation. I had to fill some time. And I went to a midday screening at Regalian Square. And it was all kids. Yeah. Because it was the summertime. Yeah.

1:38:07David Sims:And I felt a little weird. at 17 years old. But you'd go see a matinee and the theater would be filled with fucking girls. Yes. I saw this movie multiple times in theaters. And that was part of its success was Pixar had become enough of a name brand that even people who didn't grow up with Pixar, like people who were in college when Toy Story came out, were like, I guess I gotta go see the new Pixar movie. Right. The track record was just so fucking strong at this point. The opening was humongous. And then it just played throughout the entire summer. It wouldn't go away. This was the summer that everyone assumed Matrix Reloaded is the juggernaut.

1:38:41David Sims:Right. And that was May. And this came out like a week later. A week later. Or whatever. Yeah. And then by like two months in, it was like, this has zoomed past Matrix. And it keeps playing throughout the entire year, which obviously can't happen. It has zero architects. So I don't know why that happened. Just kids. Yeah. They need a Merovingian fish.

1:38:59Griffin Newman:Oh, that would be fun. A French fish. Yes. I guess the shrimp. Yeah. The shrimp chef. He goes, Jacques, you know, he's done. or whatever. Sweet. Sweevenla.

1:39:10David Sims:Yeah. Who voices him? That's Joe Ranft. Love it. Who's also Wheezy. Yeah. Oh. It's many, many voices. Is Wheezy dead? Well, Joe Ranft is dead, sadly. Do you know what happened? Joe Ranft was working on the movie Cars. No, what happened? I'm sorry. He was working on the movie Cars, which I think he was maybe co-director on.

1:39:30Griffin Newman:Yeah, I think that was where he was rising up to right here.

1:39:32David Sims:What's the worst way he could have died? Run over by car accident. Car accident.

1:39:36Griffin Newman:That's really sad. So who else died is the 399 eggs in Coral. And then...

1:39:45David Sims:Never forget about the 399.

1:39:47Griffin Newman:I do feel like they have... That's why they do it as well. Because fish do have hundreds of children. So they have to come up with this kind of plotty way that it's like a one father, one son. It's like how Judy Hopps has like 100 siblings. But it's what's... Don't get me...

1:40:01David Sims:Do not get me started on that. It's what's really smart about the setup, I think, too, where you're like, what is the only circumstance in which a parent would be this obsessive over one child? And it's where they make these choices of like, when is the characterization being dictated more by the behavior of fish versus the behavior of humans? And with Marlon, they find this exact midpoint where you're like, well, if fish have hundreds of children, they couldn't be this helicopter-y. But if he has a traumatic event that gives him only one child, then is he just like a neurotic parent in the early 2000s?

1:40:35David Sims:I also think to my point of just like this thing that Stanton was able to identify of how to make animated characters be grownups. Like this is a movie in which Nemo is the title character, but Nemo is the third lead. The two leads are grownups. True. And same with Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story and A Bug's Life that all have kids in them, but the kids are supporting. And the grownups talk like modern grownups. and when we enter into this scene, what's immediately kind of comfortable about it is that it has the vibe of a couple who have been looking at houses all day.

1:41:11Griffin Newman:Yeah, right. Right?

1:41:12David Sims:That you feel where their in-jokes are, how they needle each other. An IKEA couple. The satisfaction of, you know what? You're right, this place is good. And then how immediately that paradise is destroyed by this Barracuda.

1:41:26Griffin Newman:That's the villain of the movie, Griffin. Yeah. Barracuda.

1:41:29David Sims:Barracuda.

1:41:30Griffin Newman:Yeah.

1:41:31David Sims:Barracuda? Anyway, years later, cut to Nemo lives. He has fucked up Finn. I know we're just hyper fixating on the first scene of this movie a lot. Let's move past it. But for how large the trauma of the Barracuda, and as you said, like many parents who are just like, I just don't show this scene to my kid. It is funny that when you look at it, the Barracuda is still cartoonish looking. Like has like a big goofy googly eye. It's like a scary cartoon. It's also like a perfect kind of trauma by implication where you see the moment where she clocks the barracuda. I know, and then she looks down. He notices it because she's no longer riffing with him.

1:42:08David Sims:He's inside the anemone. You are fixating on this. He peeks out. Yes. There's perfect fucking acting of her eyeline changing to the barracuda and trying to game out if she can make the move to protect the eggs. How's she going to protect them?

1:42:21Griffin Newman:She's just one fish.

1:42:22David Sims:And then Marlin gets hit by the tail, blackout. You don't see her die. you just have him wake up to her not being there and only the one egg with the crack. No egg in the fins. Right.

1:42:32Griffin Newman:The crack is why he has a... One assumes that's the bum fin reasoning. He's lucky. I don't think those eggs can really crack because they're like jelly, but like who cares? Lucky fin. Yes. So they live in an enemy. Yes. Marlin and Nemo. And Nemo wants to start school. I guess it's sort of a September because the year's starting. He's been eager to start. Marlin keeps holding him back. He has to remember to brush his anemone. How long did clownfish live? Eight, six to ten years in the wild. Ten to twenty in an aquarium. Should have kept him at the dentist.

1:43:05David Sims:Well, Dory will get to the aquarium. It's a thing that Stanton said also when he saw that picture of them poking out of the anemone and said like, oh, what about clownfish? Then he looked into it and he was like, clownfish live in anemones and rarely leave. that he, there was like a gift in researching the species of, oh, they live in this weird like security net that also can sting them and try not to leave the bubble. I think it is a really smart characterization choice. They dialed in the exact right amount of anxiety that Marlin can have because there's an insufferable version of this movie where Marlin is like, Bo is afraid.

1:43:44Yeah.

1:43:44David Sims:Where he is so terrified. He's at danger out of every corner. Right, that he literally doesn't want to leave the anemone. There's something in the fact, and even just the way he's doing bits with Nemo at the beginning, where it's like he wants to think of himself as a funny guy. He wants to think of himself as not being too uptight. Easygoing dad. Yeah, the neighborhood dads know him already once he gets to the drop-off. This is true. Everyone tries to relate to him like a normal person, and then he just always puts a little too much in it. He always gets a little too wound up. Can't tell the joke.

1:44:14Griffin Newman:And no one's mean, but I like when he's fucking up the joke. they're just like, ugh. You know, like all the dads

1:44:20David Sims:are just like, can we stop? The one guy just goes, for a clownfish, he's not very funny. And then the other guy goes, pity.

1:44:27Griffin Newman:It's a jellyfish, a seahorse, and I'm trying to think the dad. It's the type of fish of the one who says, I'm obnoxious. Yes.

1:44:35David Sims:Which is Dewey from Malcolm in the Metal. Which might be a yellow tang. Yeah. Or an angel fish. I think that's right. No, no, no.

1:44:42Griffin Newman:Dory is a blue tang. Yeah, but here I am speaking about a yellow tang. Oh, yeah, no, you're right. In fact, you're saying something different, David, and this is why you should listen to women. Oh, no, Bubbles is a yellow tang. Yeah, Bubbles is a yellow tang. So these might be angelfish. Not to be confused, though, with Puditang. No. Puditang is in the film, but you have to look for him.

1:44:59David Sims:Let's also say we've invoked Bubbles, but we're not yet getting to the root of the matter.

1:45:03Griffin Newman:We will do that later.

1:45:08Griffin Newman:Willem Dafoe is an angelfish. Bubbles is a yellow tang. So what's the kit? A butterfly fish. Cool. The others are a flapjack octopus, which is those octopuses with like the cute little legs that kind of go like... She is adorable. And a seahorse. So it's not a jellyfish, it's an octopus.

1:45:28David Sims:Her one tendril's shorter than the others, but you never notice when she twirls them like this.

1:45:32Griffin Newman:Because jellyfish in this movie are like anglerfish in that they seem to lack a consciousness, a.k.a. eyes. Well, jellyfish in real life definitely don't have a brain. They don't have a brain. my daughter has endless questions for me about jellyfish which I fully sent because we go to the aquarium all the time I was gonna say like four times a day you go to the aquarium it's the best place on earth but like where she is she has really reasonable questions of just like why and how like why do they exist and then what's what is this like where's and I'm like how do they eat and I'm like I don't really know man they're weird jellyfish are weird you ever been sung like jellyfish question from the room oh yeah me too it really hurts sucks fucking sucks You ever get peed on?

1:46:13Griffin Newman:Yeah, but not for that reason. We packed sand on it. Oh, sorry, I fully wasn't. Fine. I think peeing doesn't really work and sand possibly does, right? A bit more. Yes. Peeing is one of those classic like old wives tales things.

1:46:29David Sims:It does feel like as much as he's trying to break out of a sense of a Pixar formula that was starting to codify at this point, this is the most traditional Pixar move of now let's do eight minutes of basically blackout gags of what's funny about fish. Right. Like Toy Story has this the second Andy leaves the room and you're like, what's every character's game? Yep. I feel like certainly Monsters, Inc. has this with Mike and Sully walking through Monstropolis the first time. And you're like, okay, how does a Monster City work? You have all of this, which also feels like it's him knowing you have to counterbalance the trauma of what just happened in the movie.

1:47:07David Sims:It's nice that they have a nice dynamic, but also kids need to feel comfortable now.

1:47:12Griffin Newman:It's very economical. Yeah. You get right to Nemo going away without it feeling rushed, you know, getting in trouble. It's basically, I mean,

1:47:21David Sims:Nemo was taken at like minute 14 and I think Dory enters at minute 16. Like he basically gets both of those things set up within the first 15 minutes of the movie.

1:47:29Griffin Newman:Of course, right. Their school is that they will ride on the back of a manta ray and he'll tell them things about fish. A singing teacher named Mr. Ray. He's just so good.

1:47:38David Sims:who likes diffusing conflict.

1:47:42Griffin Newman:Right, who's very, very good at handling interpersonal, interofficial. Yeah, it's cool to have a teacher who's also sort of also the boss.

1:47:49David Sims:Yes, great, great point. And the other parents are commanding Marlon for seeming kind of chill, even if he's not funny. But then Nemo, he pushes a little too far.

1:48:00Griffin Newman:He's encouraged by the other boys.

1:48:01David Sims:But what also happens, he finds out that the day he's finally letting his son go to school also is the day they're going to the drop-off. Yes. The dads are giving him credit. The edge of the reef. Yeah, you seem pretty chill. Drop off! I was stressed out. Right. And then that's, I regret it. I never should have let him do this. He runs out. He embarrasses Nemo in front of his friends. And Nemo feels the need to rebel. He's going to touch the butt. He's going to touch the butt. Classic comedy. And it's also nice to have the comedy there because that's hilarious if you're a kid. And it helps diffuse the situation a little bit, which is very scary.

1:48:33David Sims:It is an acting moment that I love in this film. Nemo's silent performance of challenging his father to touch the butt and they play it like Nemo is in like an FBI standoff where he won't break eye contact and he just taps it really quickly and intensely. I love the kid going

1:48:52Griffin Newman:it's really funny.

1:48:54David Sims:But there's also such a loud smack sound when he hits the butt there's so much force on it. And his point is proven he's ready to swim back to his father unfortunately. A big bad dentist. Right. The deep sea divers come.

1:49:08Griffin Newman:One puts Nemo in a Ziploc bag. The other one really rudely takes a picture of Marlin.

1:49:14David Sims:A detail I love is that when the flash goes off on Marlin, Marlin reacts by turning sideways and his eye goes wall-eyed. So it's like the pose in the photo is what a fish would look like. That is. Versus a cartoon fish. I never thought about that. It's a really quick gag. His fish's eyes go this way, but in the movie they have to look this way. He becomes flush and pointing out. That's funny. I remember reading a fucking like screenplay guidebook that was showing how all Hollywood movies fit into certain storytelling formulas. And it tried to argue that the dentist is the antagonist of this movie, which is wrong.

1:49:51David Sims:The antagonist of this movie is Marlon's anxiety.

1:49:53Griffin Newman:Yes, right. That is what needs to be overcome and defeated. Right. I mean, also, Nemo does get captured in that it does suck. It's a problem. No one's villainous. Right. The same as these creatures just doing what they want to do. Right. All through the ocean. Like the seagulls are they're not villains, but they're not they're not sympathetic.

1:50:13David Sims:You could argue that the obstructions that almost feel malevolent in the movie are not circle of life, but like just the survival of the fittest mechanisms. Right. Of just this is the ecosystem of how fish survive in relationship to each other. But there's also like the reason why the tank stuff doesn't feel stagnant is Gil is able to kind of teach Nemo the thing that Marlon's afraid to teach him. That Marlon Marlon is so.

1:50:42Griffin Newman:Phil Marlon.

1:50:43David Sims:Pull up Marlon. Marlon is so terrified by what he perceives as Nemo's weakness because of the lucky Finn that he wants to teach him how to live a life devoid of risk and is overcorrecting. And Gil is someone who similarly is, like, scarred and empowers Nemo to feel like he has the ability to actually do things. Yeah. We'll get into his initiation ritual, but I love that. They give him that little thing to feel brave.

1:51:13Griffin Newman:Okay, so Marlon bangs into Dory, trying to find him. Like, immediately. Bangs into Dory immediately. She can't help him. Who's that character introduction?

1:51:23David Sims:Well, of course, I know right this way. And then while he's following her, she starts doing the panic looking over her shoulder. Who's this creepy guy? And then she does the aggro like,

1:51:34Griffin Newman:you got a problem, huh? It's a tossed off joke. Obviously, it then becomes the premise of an entirely new movie. It runs in my family. at least I think it does. I think it does. Where are they? Makes me laugh so hard every time.

1:51:47David Sims:And then it's just a two shot that holds for like 10 seconds of silence. I'm laughing thinking about it. And then she looks back and she goes, hi, I'm Dory. She can't remember. It's one run on thought. The timing is so good.

1:52:01Griffin Newman:Where are they? It's just so fucking funny because like you never need to explain it. The whole movie then explains it. Her dad is fucking pattern baldness, blue tang or whatever. we'll get to that yeah

1:52:15David Sims:but the movie's been moving so fast up until this point that when you have that sustained two shot of just letting the joke rhythm of Ellen drive the movie it feels like a nice reset point uh

1:52:30Griffin Newman:Dory and him then pretty much the next thing is the sharks right like pretty much immediately run into Bruce this is the one thing in the movie that always felt an eency bit cute to me. The entire shark dynamic? I agree. I don't love... The self-help therapy-speak stuff. I don't love the trope of characters, same with Wreck-It Ralph, in a group therapy or in like a blank anonymous... Overdone.

1:52:57David Sims:It's not my favorite. Now, can I play devil's advocate and say this was pretty early in that? It is wildly overdone now. I remember not liking it in 2003. We must acknowledge that the sharks were kind of the immediate breakout characters. Bruce was big. Bruce had a big summer.

1:53:13Griffin Newman:Well, Bruce looks awesome. Dory is the breakout character.

1:53:16David Sims:Well, Dory's a movie star. Dory's like a leading lady. Dory's first on the college. She's an algenue. No, but one of the big posters was Bruce in the back.

1:53:26Griffin Newman:I love, of course, that it's the great Barry Humphreys, Dame Edna herself. Playing scary.

1:53:31David Sims:And then Eric Bana and who's the third one? Interesting. So the third shark in this dynamic is played by Bruce Spence. Now, here's what's interesting about this guy. And hold on to your seats. He played the gyrocopter pilot in The Road Warrior, a.k.a. Mad Max 2. Whoa. He's also Teon Midon in Star Wars Episode III, Revenge of the Sith. This very year, he is the train man.

1:53:57Griffin Newman:His Rangers Revolutions is out in just a few months.

1:53:59David Sims:David, he was arguably the king of the box office in 2003. Except he got cut out a lot of the rings. Entertainment Weekly did a little sidebar in their 2003 year in review where they said he was the highest grossing actor because he had Matrix Revolutions and Finding Nemo. And if he had made the cut of Return of the King, I think he would have had$2 billion in box office. Wow. It's like how Jonathan Bailey was king of the box office last year.

1:54:26Griffin Newman:Now, why is that? Well, apart from, oh, because Jurassic, was that last year? Yeah. Was that but last year? It was. That he saw a dinosaur? Right. And went, oh, cool. He cried? that he was the scarecrow.

1:54:40David Sims:Yes, Ben.

1:54:41Griffin Newman:I like the shark house. Thank you.

1:54:43David Sims:I like that they live around bombs.

1:54:47Griffin Newman:The bombs are awesome. The bombs are cool and them being blown up is cool. It is funny that Ben's like, attached to chains. Not just bombs, my friend. Let's not forget. And I like a shipwreck too.

1:55:00David Sims:Yeah. I also feel like, what is it? Chum and what's the other shark's name? Crunch or Crush? Let me find out. Anchor. Anchor. Chum and Bruce. Anchor and Chum. Yeah, Ocrush is the turtle. Right. And Anchor is a hammerhead. Yes. And Chum has the hook through his face. They just feel like very Ben characters. Definitely. Specifically Anchor and Chum.

1:55:21Griffin Newman:They should get their own movie. But yeah, like the joke obviously right is they don't eat fish anymore. What will they be eating? Doesn't really come up. Kelp or some shit. I just think this. Like real vegans. I think sharks need like a tremendous amount of food to operate, right? I think this is incredibly well-staged action sequence. It's so good. It's incredibly well done. The bomb's exploding. Dory's blood coming out of her nose. And then the way his eyes change is so cool. Oh, just shark eyes. Yes. He just starts tripping. That's good. No, no, Mike, don't do it, Mike. That's really funny.

1:55:57David Sims:I think several points in this movie, in a film that you would not classify as an action film, Stanton kind of like pulls off a fish version of an Indiana Jones sequence, where even just like Bruce leading them through the establishment of the mines in the sea, right? Like all the sort of visual stuff it needs to teach you that's then going to pay off in the sequence, the missile silo that they can hide out in, how they can activate that to get rid of Bruce, which then even has the comedy within it of Anchor and Chum jumping in between Bruce's bites to apologize for his behavior. and it's just all like he keeps teaching you things that don't feel like overstated setups that pay off in very satisfying ways where then you can just have action happen with real tension because you know this is a universe in which death can happen.

1:56:48David Sims:Characters can die in this movie and still get jokes in. Ben's laughing at how excited I am.

1:56:52Griffin Newman:Tori is so funny when she forgets that they're being chased and then launches the missile so that they go back towards the shark.

1:57:04David Sims:Yes, yes.

1:57:05Griffin Newman:Any Dory joke like that works.

1:57:07David Sims:We should call this out too. This is the other thing, is that Dory can read English even though she can't remember things.

1:57:12Griffin Newman:32 Wallaby Way.

1:57:12David Sims:That's the reason that Marlon has to stick with her because the only thing they have to lead them towards Nemo is the address written on the back. 42 Wallaby Way. During this is when they find the goggles. Exactly. The diver's goggles, he clocks them. Right. We learn she can read English because she sees the sign that says escape. Yes. Right. This kind of perfect like he's stuck with her because she can do a thing that he can't do even if she doesn't understand what she's doing. And she's constantly getting it wrong. But then in this like chain of events it's like going after the goggles and the snap of the elastic band is what causes her to bleed which is activates Bruce.

1:57:53Griffin Newman:Yeah. She's so good to even just doing the kind of like I'm fine I'm fine. You know like this is also a character design that should not

1:58:00David Sims:be like a plausible nosebleed coming out of it. All of these things. She's so fucking narrow. Her face is basically a pencil when head on. With eyes sticking out either side. Right. And she's just got like a nose bump and a mouth.

1:58:13Griffin Newman:There's a lot of blue tangs at the Brooklyn Aquarium, the New York Aquarium. Yeah. And my daughter's always like, Dory, there she is. This is an incredibly difficult actual species to get emotion at. I got no notes. Yeah. I got no notes in any of the animation in this movie. I think it's perfect. I think it's the apex of Pixar. Yeah. I really do. Yeah. I mean, maybe Ratatouille. Like, Ratatouille has such a beautiful kind of, like, approach to all of its things. I think this is a better movie. Well, that's... Okay. Everyone relax. We're all saying stuff.

1:58:43David Sims:This is the five star tier for me, right? The two toy stories, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, Incredibles. Those are the ones at the very, very top of the heap for me. Those are like perfect movies in my opinion. I do think Stanton is the guy within Pixar who starts getting most fascinated by the idea that in computer animation, you can simulate a camera in a way that you can't in hand draw. and he pushes that really far in WALL-E, where WALL-E is really selling the illusion of there is a human operator. Like, WALL-E has delayed zooms and shit like that. I know this is basically spoiling our list,

1:59:25Griffin Newman:but do you like this more than WALL-E? Where are you there?

1:59:29David Sims:I'm not sure where I am. I think WALL-E's a little bit more imperfect than this film. Right, right. The static highs of WALL-E. The high highs. Also, you just have to think about when that movie got announced, and it was like Andrew Stanton is making a robot rom-com in the style of silent films, I lost my fucking mind. When it was like he's making a robot Buster Keaton movie, it felt like they had designed a film specifically for me. That makes sense. Becca? Huh?

2:00:00Griffin Newman:Wally or Nemo? Oh, Nemo. Like, Wally is, like, I love Ratatouille so much, so that's not far behind Nemo. Wally I have a harder time with the things That are imperfect about it But you think this is Stanton's best film maybe But Wally's more of a great Look this is the debate This is the grand debate We'll have over these six weeks I guess

2:00:19David Sims:It's like a Godfather versus Apocalypse Now situation Where you're like Oh that's interesting

2:00:24Griffin Newman:I don't find that a tough situation anymore I recently rewatched Apocalypse Now And was like I think I can see Like this movie has left me

2:00:34David Sims:It's a messier film

2:00:35Griffin Newman:It's such a big movie for me as a teen obviously it's incredible I also think like

2:00:39David Sims:the most ecstatic things that movie can accomplish are part and parcel with its messiness right totally which feels the same as WALL-E to me where I'm like WALL-E is like a couple steps off of being perfect for me but if it was perfect it maybe wouldn't able to achieve the weird things it's able to pull off but this film it feels like Stanton is with really fucking limited technology at this time still and this shit's so fucking expensive to do and they talk about the methods they had to develop and the strategies of how to stop it from costing like$500 million, how do you continue to visually maintain the relationship between the characters and the water they're in?

2:01:18David Sims:Right, right, right, right. Like in Shark Tale, it's just characters floating. In this, they're like, we can't in every shot show the bubbles or the waves of their fin motion. We can't always show the distortion of, you know, the thickness of the water at this point at different levels in the darkness or whatever, but they choose their battles really well. There are all these insane hacks they do where basically they create one texture surface, which is the surface of the water whenever they're peeking their heads up above. And then they copy that and put a different layer on top of it to make it the ocean floor.

2:01:53David Sims:So basically the sand and the water are the same element, but one is fixed and one is in motion. Similarly, they couldn't figure out how to make the anemone. And the Monsters, Inc. team, which was working on the other side of the studio had cracked the fur thing. Right. And someone went, oh, if you take a ball of fur and then like size it up like crazy so every strand is really thick. Whoa. Then the anemone is just overgrown hair. So there's stuff in like animation that's like when you hear stories about Sam Raimi figuring out a hack for like how to pull off a special effect in a cheap way that this movie is using to like insane effect because none of it feels like shortcuts.

2:02:33David Sims:and it's just so painterly and beautiful and even just the fucking the lighting on this movie I wanted to bring up the lighting especially because we're in a crisis in 2026 to see a movie where it's so thoughtfully done so vivid and beautiful and Pixar is like a big part of their process is what they call the color scripts where they do these pastel kind of storyboards not of every shot but basically of every sequence to look at the color tones of the movie Which is like a classic Disney 50s type thing as well. To establish the moods of like, when is it brightest and when is it coldest and when do you need to establish a tone of things feeling ominous versus sad, you know?

2:03:16David Sims:And I think this movie uses the like depths of the ocean to convey those things. Things get brighter when they're closer to the surface. Right. Very cool. Where you see more reflection of the light from the above.

2:03:27Griffin Newman:Honestly, the whole anglerfish sequence, you know, is such a bravura demonstration of all that. You know, the light on the anglerfish. Right. So they get away and pretty quickly they're swimming down to retrieve.

2:03:42David Sims:Right. When they get away from Bruce, that's when they come across the anglerfish. They don't get a second to rest. No. It's. Yeah. It's.

2:03:50Griffin Newman:You know how male anglerfish reproduce? How? You know, right? They suck their index. I'm taking a guess. They're little and they fuse to the girl anglerfish and like melt into her and just leave behind their balls. And then the female anglerfish uses the balls to like make it lay. Do they come and get the balls back? No, they die. That's the end for them. They die, mate. You know, they're just like. Go out on top. Exactly. I mean, nice work if you can get it. And it's one of those like dimorphism things where like the woman is like the woman. The woman. man the female anglo-pitch is like 10 times bigger than the male or whatever yeah like the ocean floor stuff brings up like deep sea is as scary and unknowable as outer space yes the creatures that are in it are alien this one looks like an hr giger alien like it's terrifying this

2:04:47David Sims:is a great call i mean james cameron taught us about the aliens uh of the deep and the ghosts of the abyss. Goes to the abyss and into the deep. That's right. I think it is very smart that this movie avoids. Yeah, they can't go down there. If you were to anthropomorphize the deep sea creatures more, it would feel like this is a bad neighborhood in a way that was coded very dangerously. Leave that shit for Shark Tale. Exactly. It makes it much easier to just be like, this is basically outer space and we don't understand the rules of what's happening here. These characters don't have faces that you can like understand or talk to.

2:05:20Griffin Newman:Yeah, I feel like if it had a voice, it would be too scary for kids. Totally. It would be like breathing heavily. It's already kind of scary. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, right,

2:05:30David Sims:it's selective which characters can't speak. It's the ones where even just being around them is potentially a danger, you know?

2:05:38Griffin Newman:Yeah. So to move on from the, you know, from this, like pretty quickly, we are also in the tank, right? Like around this time is when we're sort of cutting over to the tank.

2:05:48David Sims:I was looking, I feel like the tank basically comes in 30 minutes in. We stay with just Marlon and Dory for a while. No, excuse me. It's right after the Bruce sequence. Because the bomb goes off. It cuts to the two birds and the one who thinks the other one farted. It's a really good tension relief gag. And a really good way to bridge ocean worlds and silly dentist worlds. So the tank comes in minute 25. Cool. And the tank is like, we've already, at this point, we've already been introduced to like 12 incredible characters. Yeah. Let's throw in a whole perfect little chamber piece sitcom ensemble of characters who are going absolutely stir crazy.

2:06:29You got Gil. Willem Dafoe.

2:06:31Griffin Newman:Yeah. Willem Dafoe. Baby J. Doe. Sorry, I'm being a Catherine Lanasa. Baby Cheeto? Baby J. Doe. Baby J. Doe. There's a Baby J. Doe. In the pit season two, early on, there is an abandoned baby. Okay. And Catherine Lanasa Who's gonna look over this baby Jane Doe? It's like there's a baby Jane Doe! Sounds good Yeah it rocks And like Pitt fandom which is very normal Not toxic at all totally regular One of the recurring jokes about this season Is like they're always like predictions for a finale Baby Jane Doe you know saves the day Like she will have laser vision You know that they keep being like this abandoned baby Yeah someone was like I've seen the ending And just I won't spoil it but don't look up baby Jane Doe and rocket launcher.

2:07:17David Sims:I don't say this lightly. Yeah, go ahead. But just three shows I don't engage with in the last four months, I've just been reading insane headlines about the way the fandom is treating these actors.

2:07:28Griffin Newman:Like, it's broken containment on, like, right, like, that you are reading about it. Fandom needs to die.

2:07:33David Sims:It really does. It's really what's happening in Pit World. The shit that was happening to the heated rivalry, guys. I'm like, this isn't good, but I'm not surprised because this is a show that's driven on a sort of Team Edward, Team Jacob, over-obsession with... But blankies are great. We like that. We love your money.

2:07:52Griffin Newman:I mean, and your fandom. Easy, easy, easy, easy.

2:07:55David Sims:But then, like, the pit shit that's been happening, and then there was the fucking Percy Jackson kid was like, I can't go to prom. Oh, yeah. Because whoever... I can't go to prom! Whoever he takes to prom, the fans are gonna send death threats to. He was basically like, the fans have, like, tracked down every girl in my high school class and is sending death threats saying, like, you better not go on a date with him because he belongs to me. Oh, my God. Everyone needs to chill the fuck out. It's just, but it's the internet

2:08:23Griffin Newman:and it's the way the algorithms feed and all that. It's so crazy. But Pitt is the last show I would expect to have that.

2:08:29David Sims:Of course. And I just keep reading these insane things.

2:08:31Griffin Newman:I think that's why it took everyone by surprise. Yes. Where they're like, what? It's like a sober hospital procedural. And everyone's just like, I can't believe that Robbie did that. And it's like, he's a fictional character.

2:08:42David Sims:But then they're like angry at which actors aren't coming back when it's not. Oh, yeah.

2:08:47Griffin Newman:They're being real normal about everything. This group. Okay, so we got Gil.

2:08:53David Sims:And then it's like sitcom fucking all-stars, right? It's like Brad Garrett. He's the puffer fish. We have Allison Janney from the West Wing. We love her. Steven Root from News Radio. Brad Garrett from Every Loves Raymond, obviously. Vicky Lewis, also from News Radio. Austin Pendleton is Gurgle.

2:09:11Griffin Newman:He's a guy. theater actor million movies

2:09:14David Sims:yeah we love it Max from the Muppet movie and then Joe Ranft is Jacques but immediately everyone has their bit oh yeah he's clean Nemo wakes up and sees all the scary imagery of the like aquarium toys and everything you feel like okay so this is gonna be like analogous to him being in prison now and he's stuck with a bunch of scary inmates and then immediately it's like no this is like a mental hospital yeah it's cuckoo's neck they all have conditions they're so sweet right right so okay

2:09:41Griffin Newman:let me try so So Gil is scarred, and he's kind of battle-hearted. And we learned he also has a bad fin. He's got a bad fin, too. They basically -

2:09:50David Sims:And it never stopped him. I don't know if you've noticed this. The scarring pattern on his face is basically one-to-one with Platoon. I was about to say, it's Platoon, right? They give him the same scars. That's funny. Defoe plays it so straight, but also I think it's incredibly warm in this movie. Yeah. He's this alternate father figure.

2:10:08Griffin Newman:I want Gil to believe in me.

2:10:10David Sims:he's so good because you're just like there's a universe in which they go like the joke is you're really intense he's the drill sergeant you play it really seriously yeah and at the end you show a little bit of warmth but even from the beginning he's playing the vulnerability of this

2:10:23Griffin Newman:guy um it's important too that he was the only fish that ever lived in the ocean yeah he is the the rest of them are tankies yeah um brad uh the the puffer fish so he he sometimes he goes puff mode. I guess that's his problem. He doesn't really have any other problems. He's got like a

2:10:40David Sims:hair trigger anxiety response. It's the equivalent of having like panic attacks or whatever.

2:10:44Griffin Newman:I guess Peach is kind of maybe the most balanced, but she's a bit of a gossip. And a know-it-all.

2:10:50David Sims:Bubbles loves Bubbles. He's obsessed with the Bubbles. He's OCD and he's obsessed with the little treasure chest that releases Bubbles and trying to keep them in there.

2:10:58Griffin Newman:One of the great fish tank toys.

2:11:01David Sims:If not, I think the top. Or I guess, no, Gurgle's the one who's OCD

2:11:04Griffin Newman:and is the meat freak. And then Deb, I just love the idea that she's obsessed with her own reflection. This is my sister Flo.

2:11:13David Sims:Who she thinks is a liar. She told Nemo not to trust Flo. It's so funny. It's really good. Yeah. And then Jacques is just a high-status elitist Frenchman. He's kind of good, actually. He's really fun. Jacques rolls.

2:11:28Griffin Newman:So they all want out, though, right? Like they all want out of the tank and they have like, you know, a sort of developing plan that Nemo fits into.

2:11:37David Sims:He's dropped into a great escape situation where it's like there have been years of failed plans. They keep on trying things that don't work and Nemo feels to them like he offers some new opportunities, specifically in the fact that he's small. Right. Right. Yep.

2:11:51Griffin Newman:He can go into the filter and put the stone in the fan and all that stuff.

2:11:56David Sims:Speaking to how complete the kind of vision of this movie was when Stanton wrote it, the major changes you hear about in the film are taking out things that were gilding the lily rather than needing to figure out how to ultimately get to things. So like, you know, unwinding the flashback structure. He originally had Gil be more of a I don't know whether to trust this guy or not character. character he played him more scary up top sure yeah there's a scene where nemo gets gill to open up and talk about what happened to him and how he ended up in the tank and he tells this whole story about his family that went missing and where he came from and then nemo finds out later in the movie that gill has been lying it's like a joker do you want to know how i got these scars thing and that every detail that gill told him is in a picture book that's in the dentist's waiting room that he hears a kid read.

2:12:51David Sims:And he was just like, we don't need this. Yeah. Just let Gil be actually invested in helping this kid. Yeah. This movie is already stuffed to the gills. Right. There were originally two seagulls.

2:13:03Griffin Newman:How many comedy points there? One trillion comedy points. No, one trillion. I now owe you comedy points.

2:13:11David Sims:You're in debt. There were originally two seagulls or not seagulls. What is it? Pelicans. Oh, yeah. Right. So the one who ends up trying to eat them was originally a fully developed character. And there was kind of a good and bad pelican. And Nigel's trying to protect them. And this other one's trying to eat them. And they were just like, none of this is necessary. Because they already have the seagulls. Right. That's their thing. But I love Nigel as a character as just this kind of like, Jeffrey Rush just playing fucking warm. Right? Just playing like a lad. Who just loves coming in because he likes dentistry.

2:13:47David Sims:Right.

2:13:47Griffin Newman:It's funny how they all know about dentistry. Yeah. It's awesome. Because they've been in this tank all these years. But they're stuck. Nigel comes and visits of his own accord. He likes to hear the dentist update. What's the gossip? What drills are you using? It's funny because it's like they are watching the dentistry like television. They are so invested.

2:14:08David Sims:Right. But for them, it's also like studying their captor to be like, where are the vulnerabilities?

2:14:13Griffin Newman:What's genius about Nigel too is you immediately recognize that is how they are going to get out of there.

2:14:20David Sims:That's what I'm talking about. It's like there's such intentionality of this story that anytime a character is introduced, you're like, what's the function they're going to serve? Yeah. And anytime you're shown a visual element, you're sort of like, oh, right. He could keep people in his beak. Right. And none of it, it's all what everyone, you know, talks about being the ideal of what you want to achieve in dramatic storytelling and especially in like film narratives is surprising but inevitable. How can you in 90 minutes pay off the things that felt like they were, they had to happen, but yet when they happen, they don't feel de-regueur.

2:14:56Griffin Newman:You really locked into this movie.

2:14:57David Sims:I've seen it so many times. And I mean, so have I. Yeah. But I truly I this is one of my go to I can't sleep movies. This is like a real comfort movie for me. And, you know, we were talking about we did our Edge of Tomorrow episode on Patreon, which I guess will have just come out or recently come out. Right. And we were talking about how you will often identify a sleep movie and watch it like literally every night for like a couple of months. Pretty much. And then you kind of like squeeze all the juice out of it and you move on to something new for a while. Yeah. Yeah. Nemo has just been in the rotation for 20 years for me.

2:15:34I probably haven't seen this movie until you rewatched it yesterday in over 15 years or something. And it was like, I know every word. Every line. Every scene. A lot of the lines are also so catchy, so sticky. This is like full of just these effortless feeling catchphrases. It's not like donkey catchphrases.

2:15:54David Sims:No, they're not dumb jokes. And so much of it is the specificity. So memorable. the actor makes a really interesting choice in the rhythm of their line delivery or the character, the design of the character that is saying that thing and the animation of what they do when they're saying it.

2:16:10Griffin Newman:So where do we leave off? Well, we've done the tank for a while. The Dory thing. They escape the anglerfish. They escape the anglerfish. We go from the tank to the anglerfish. And then it is when basically like Dory doesn't absorb the directions of like avoid the jellyfish and they go into the jellyfish. Yeah. Or is this Marlon's fault? It's Marlon's fault. She sort of remembers that they shouldn't do it. And Marlon's like, what are you talking about? This is the right way. Oh, because the school of fish does the bit too,

2:16:39David Sims:or they keep impersonating. That's John Ratzenberger. That's John Ratzenberger. Yeah, so we're going to get back to them in an amazing way. You have Marlon dejected that they lost the goggles, right? And that's when Dory introduces the just keep swimming to cheer him up. That she's also invested in him. She was able, with the anglerfish, because he used the light like a reading light, she was able to do P. Sherman 42 Wallaby Way Sydney. They've lost the goggles, but this is for the first time she's learning to remember. Yeah. Which I just think is so elegantly done that it's a gradual thing rather than at one moment suddenly.

2:17:20David Sims:You have your payoff moments with her. You have the, like, her making the emotional plea to him that, like, when I'm with you, I remember. things and you have the moment where the whole Nemo thing comes flashing back to her. She's so proud of herself right now for she's like, I've remembered that incremental. You give her little victory. So it's not just like at one point in the movie, suddenly she's fixed because her will a she repeats that she repeats it 100 times. But also like because the remembering the address is something so emotionally important to her that like I won't remember the address of a house I grew up in.

2:17:54But I'll remember P Sherman 42, I'll be away, Sydney until like I die.

2:17:57David Sims:And especially her riffing on it and her turning into the songs. Ask me again and I'll tell you. P. Sherman, 42 Wally Way. So they get to this trench and the trench looks dark and scary. Marlon. Sorry, I was pulling up to remind myself where I was. Instead, I just got the scary sounds of the trench. And Marlon is obviously like, well, we don't want to go through the dark, scary trench. We need to go over a fish who she had asked for directions earlier told her. It's the school of fish. It's the final thing. After they've been making fun of Marlon and he's like, fuck these guys. then they're like one last thing but it's after he's swum off so only she's there to hear it and they don't know that she can't remember oh right that is then i thought this happened later in the movie but i'm getting them confused with the school of fish in the end who we'll get to who are also a big silver school of fish but but the clockwork kind of precision of just like there aren't any cheats in the story they are so funny they're so specific like the conflicts they find themselves in why they're there why there isn't an easy out why they need to fight to work through the thing.

2:18:56David Sims:Like if Marlon wasn't offended by them mocking him because he's so self-serious, then he would have heard the thing about the trench. Right. And he doesn't like asking for directions. She's very friendly. She doesn't mind going up to anyone. His stubbornness screws them. They do the like, hey, is this fellow bothering you? Yeah. So they play a game of charades to cheer her up. And then because and so we've seen that they can move in this really fun way. and then they do a big arrow because they tell them they need to get to the EAC. Oh, right. They know where Sydney is.

2:19:29Griffin Newman:They show the little waves. They show the opera house. They turn into Marlin and they do like a sad face Marlin, which is pretty funny. They do a mocking impression

2:19:37David Sims:over his shoulder. They are very funny. Yes. Yes, they give them the directions. Right. Swim through, not over. Yeah, he doesn't trust her. So he distracts her. He's like, look, a shiny thing. And they go over.

2:19:51Griffin Newman:and the jellyfish fucked them up. The jellyfish fucked them up. Yeah. This is the sequence. But then they're woken up. I mean, we cut to the tank and then when we cut back to them, they're woken up on the turtles. But it's so scary, intense, and so beautiful.

2:20:04David Sims:It's another camera decision where he said they animated this whole sequence and he was like, it looks too neat and clean and perfect. There isn't tension to this. And the guy who was head of camera in the movie was like, let me try something. And he clicked twice to zoom in. Like literally just did that. Sure. and did it kind of like arbitrarily. Right. And Stanton was like, oh, if the compositions are asymmetrical, if the jellyfish's bodies are cut off, and it feels like there's just this weird environment that you can't see as full bodies. And so all of the camera placements within the sequence, which is a lot more quick cutty, are all kind of a little disorienting.

2:20:41David Sims:How did they stop the camera from getting wet? Really good question. It's a fun sequence.

2:20:46Griffin Newman:Fun. We're getting to the turtles. The turtles, okay? The turtle. In my opinion The most positive representation Of a Californian in the world This is a really good take Like of that kind of like The surfer dude thing Andrew Stanton A Massachusettsan Although he's probably lived in California For like decades at this point Yes Doing like a surfer dude accent Like oh man yeah You know right But it's like the whole point of Crush Is he's just like I'm 100 years old Or 150 or whatever he is Look at me I'm fucking chillin There's nothing annoying about this guy.

2:21:21David Sims:He's not forcing his worldview on it. Not at all. But the more you talk to him, the more you're like, this guy's got it fucking figured out. He's like, you know, when there's like cool teen, like when there's cool Jesus for teens. Do you know what I mean?

2:21:33Griffin Newman:Crush is cool Jesus. You think he's kind of like a youth pastor, but like a really nice youth pastor? He's like the cool Jesus. He's the cool hippie Jesus that the youth pastor is talking about. Yeah, I guess like a youth pastor wishes he could be crushed. But he is demonstrating an extremely different parenting style. Yes. Right? Marlon is being exposed to it is actually healthy for your kid. Much less helicopter-y kind of parenting. He'll find his way. A way a kid learns to be safe in the world is to fail or fall off the swing and then figure it out.

2:22:07David Sims:To let them be empowered in their choices and feel like it's based on experiences rather than rules being placed around them. Yeah, and feel to have a sense of adventure that feels safe. And just the whole idea of like, you know, locating the EAC as a real phenomenon and being like, man, OK, so turtles, would they be like surfers? Yeah. If they're literally just in the flow of this. It's sort of like a highway. Right. Like when you see the fish that are merging on.

2:22:33Griffin Newman:But it also is skydiving. Yes. Yeah, right. Right, right. Oh, when Squirt gives the big skydiver like, OK, we're going to have a great jump today.

2:22:42David Sims:Totally I mean incredible performance from Stanton It's another one of these early examples Where here's a role that they earmark of like Well at some point we'll hire like a celebrity To do it And he would do it in all the story reels Much like Brad Bird doing Edna Mode Or whatever right Well that's the opposite story Where they hired Much like William H. Macy It's never been named But everyone believes it's Lily Tomlin That he hired Lily Tomlin And she was doing the records and he kept on giving her really specific directions of being like, no, I think it's more like this and it's more like this.

2:23:16David Sims:And Lily Tomlin literally, excuse me, I got myself to a tongue twister. Lily Tomlin literally goes, I think you should just do this. Why don't you do it then? And then he just does it. Edna was born. Right. This was the opposite where when they were - Edna mode. When they were in the early stages, everyone around Stanton was just like, you should just fucking do this. He's like a Hawaiian shirt guy. Well, all the Pixar guys at this point in time or Hawaiian shirt good. Stace is a little preppier. He's got that New England thing going on. Yeah, but this is outside of himself, but he just like, he fucking found the character.

2:23:51David Sims:No one's going to do it better.

2:23:52Griffin Newman:Should I have a Hawaiian shirt here?

2:23:53David Sims:No, absolutely not. That would be a fucking nightmare. I think you're wearing a baseball shirt, and it's awesome.

2:23:59Griffin Newman:I'm in my Mets era. Yeah, that's the era. I keep buying jerseys. So the other thing, as we've been saying about how all the character choices make sense for the type of animal, Yeah. This type of more relaxed parenting style, not only that they're surfers and whatever else, but it's also because they hatch their eggs really far away. Yeah. And Marlon goes, how do you trust that they'll come and swim all this way in the big, big ocean and find you? And it's like, oh, when they're ready, they'll when you know, you know, you know.

2:24:30David Sims:But it's finding those gifts of like you do research on different species and you go, oh, that's interesting. That's an interesting character detail. rather than forcing things onto characters, you find these discoveries. I want to mention that in between, right before Marlon waking up... Oh, we have tank stuff. Yes, you have the first attempted tank escape, which is genuinely pretty upsetting. That's also an Indiana Jones type...

2:24:55Griffin Newman:I really like that it's a moment for Gil to be like, I pushed the kid too hard, or I was being crazy thinking this would work.

2:25:03David Sims:Also that he's only been dealing with other adults, and that he's pushing Nemo to the same extent. He's the opposite of Marlin, where rather than not letting him do anything, he's making Nemo do too much. Yeah, so he pressures him. The plan is, because Nemo's small, he's going to swim into the filtration system and jam one of those little tank pebbles into the rotating thing, the motor, to jam it, and then the tank will get gunky. They will all have to be put into little bags while the dentist cleans it. we get a really fun visual where he's explaining how the planet's going to work. And talk about the camera placement.

2:25:39It's like this POV of these bagged fish rolling across the highway.

2:25:44David Sims:Stan, I think, talks about it as the Fincher sequence. He's like, this is my homage to the Fight Club. Here's how we're going to infiltrate. You know, talking through it and all the crazy camera movements and whatever. It's really fun. It is a really smart plan.

2:25:58Griffin Newman:It's a good plan, but it has this assumption to it that I do like that it's like there's a fish logic. Yes. Of like humans will only do one thing. Right. And they don't realize that like, yeah, a human can just fucking go on Amazon and buy like a new filter. But I like that Nemo gets close.

2:26:13David Sims:Like it's not like it's a total failure. No. But it is so scary. Scary. That it does actually set Marlon back. Not Marlon, I'm sorry, Gil. It makes him question everything to a degree where he's just like, these are the lies I'm telling myself so I can survive in this fucking tank. We're never getting out of here. Right. And it flips the dynamic where Nemo is going to have to console him, basically.

2:26:35Griffin Newman:Okay, because Nemo finally does it because he hears about his dad's heroism. Well, I'm sorry.

2:26:39David Sims:Let's just run through because I need to get through this. Because you have this lesson with the turtles, right? And they send them off the EAC, but they start spreading the message. Right. This is a sequence that they talk about. It's just like kind of Pixar at their best. It's so fun. Where one night they were like, fuck, we got to solve this story problem. How can Nemo possibly receive a word that his father is looking for him? At this point in the movie, wouldn't he just give up? How do we stop the character from just conceding? And they're just like, well, what if it's a fucking game of radio, right?

2:27:16David Sims:What if it's a chain of conversation? And then what are the opportunities for characterization and all of those things? Because all these have to be like a four-second gag of what's funny is, oh, are swordfish, like, upper crust British fencers. So fun. And they basically just, like, write this all in one night, all do the voices. These are all Pixar people. It's all, like, Peterson and Stanton, like, repeating different, you know, archetypes and cultural stereotypes. And it's, like, a really fun journey that just feels like a fun story exploration. But then you get to Nigel hearing it, Nigel recognizing it, being like, I gotta tell this fucking...

2:27:56David Sims:I know, little clownfish. But you can tell that he's like, this is going to mean a lot to this kid. I got to tell him right away. Flies through with urgency. Nemo immediately is like, what? Actually, no, not possible. He's immediately heartened and then rejects it as like, that is not a thing my father could do. Yeah, that my dad would never battle a shark. Like, let alone even, like, Sandy Plankton's dad wouldn't even battle a shark. If you told him your dad is just swimming really far to get to you, even that would test his. Yeah. His his notion of his father. But this is a beautiful moment because he Nigel says some identifying features about Marlon.

2:28:37A little sport fish, trout, tuna. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. His name is Marlon.

2:28:41David Sims:Yeah. So you said he fought a shark. I heard he took down three. and you just fucking, like Spielberg shot, push in on Nemo's face and his eyes widening as he realizes the expression of his father's love in a way his father could never say to him. The understanding of what his father has gone through to try to get to him. I just find incredibly emotionally overwhelming.

2:29:06Griffin Newman:I think you're right. I think you're right. I think it's very emotionally, it's very beautiful. And so Nemo makes up his mind. He's going to try the plan again. And Gil wouldn't have wanted to push him. He disappears in a cut.

2:29:18David Sims:Yeah. Like, Nigel's telling the story. All the other fish in the tank are so excited for Nemo. And then they realize he's missing and he's already gone back up the pipe. It's like hearing of his father's bravery has emboldened him to believe that he can do things as well.

2:29:31Griffin Newman:We should also, of course, around now is when Nemo, I mean, when Marlon and Dory get sucked into a whale. And Dory speaks whale to the whale.

2:29:40David Sims:But that's right after this.

2:29:41Griffin Newman:And that changes humanity forever. It changes the world. Everyone just could not stop talking about it. It was seismic. It is so funny. I've seen Finding Dory so many times now because my daughter vastly prefers it to Finding Nemo. And that movie, I think, is pretty fun. And we will talk about it on this show. Yeah. But the way that they're just like, well, Dory has to speak whale. That should be crucial, actually. The fact that Dory doesn't know where her family was, that's the emotional arc of the movie. That throwaway line, like, in the first movie. And where did Dory learn just to read? Correct.

2:30:14Griffin Newman:They're basically like, what are the things about Dory?

2:30:17David Sims:Now that is the spine of Finding Dory. I like that movie a lot. Everything that drives me crazy in it is the checklist-y sequel. Yeah, I hate that in prequel type things. Yes, like I hate that they bring the turtles back, even though I love Crush. And it just feels like they're like, guys, you have to bring the turtles back. We need to sell like Turtle March, you know? Yes, yes. There's stuff like that that's really annoying. Well, Turtle Talk we'll get into as well. We'll get into Turtle Talk. But Whale. Whale. Yes. The whale. The whale.

2:30:46Griffin Newman:Speaking whale. That is one of the most biblical, ancient, important archetypes in myths and sagas and legends. Sure. Being swallowed by a whale. Heroes get swallowed by a whale. You just have to do it. Pinocchio. Yeah. One of the greatest animated films of all time. True. Swallowed by whale. Yeah.

2:31:07David Sims:I think it's some of the best decor. Inside of a whale? Yeah. Yeah.

2:31:13Griffin Newman:Baleen. or whatever. That's their little teeth things. Yeah, they're like filters. Yeah, which is so funny because you think of them as being sort of soft and small, but they're so packed in and hard when Marlin's trying to escape. Also, their taste buds

2:31:25David Sims:being so pronounced that the fish can hang on to them. That part, I do not like Marlin rubbing up on the taste bud. And also the water coming, like as... Flowing against where the whale is swimming. It's so interesting. Yeah. Whales are crazy. Them having this fight where Marlin's like really reaching a breaking point with Dory of being like, you keep thinking you can do, you know, you can speak to whales, you can read, you can do all this fucking shit. And meanwhile, it's just the whale approaching them so fucking slowly. Right, and because of the weird perspective and lighting and all the tricks in the water, she's going like, hey, little fella.

2:32:00I don't think that's little fella. That's Pyakon. Yeah, that's Pyakon. He is such a Pyakon because he is helping them.

2:32:07David Sims:It's interesting that Way of Water inverts what you're talking about where the villains go inside the whale and do something terrible. Take their immortality juices. Well, that's a lesson about whales are something grander and more sacred than us. And we can't be trying to mess with it. True. I do like that the whale basically becomes a location, right?

2:32:28Griffin Newman:That it's like, yeah, it's a room. And they talk it up. Right. But I like Becca's thing of like, right, also this kind of like, they're passing through a siege perilous here. Yeah. The biblical thing. Yes. That they are transformed by being expelled from the whale. Right.

2:32:41David Sims:And it's much like Nemo's character growth happening in him listening to Nigel's story, like just really elegant show don't tell stuff through action. It's just such a fucking perfect piece of screenwriting when Marlon is yelling at Dory for trying to come up with a solution for how to save themselves. Yeah. And he's just saying no to everything she's fucking doing. And then he finally breaks and says, my favorite line, you think you can do these things, but you just can't, Nemo. And what I love about it is you see the shock on her face, the reaction of why he called me Nemo. She can't quite comprehend it.

2:33:20David Sims:But then it cuts back to him and he looks so fucking embarrassed. Like he realizes what he just said. Her name's Dory. Yes. Well, that's the only reason. Well, she's like, who's Nemo? I thought your kid is Harpo Chico Fabio. Fabio, yes. But he gets it the second it comes out of his mouth. What?

2:33:40Griffin Newman:Harpo. Just laughing about Dory. It's another classic comedy thing.

2:33:45David Sims:Anytime she confidently says the wrong name and he just has to go Nemo. He just has to correct her so fast. So Nemo is a very fun word to say. It's awesome that it's said like a trillion times in this movie. It's a really cute, fun name.

2:34:12Griffin Newman:Of course, Nemo himself escapes all by himself. Like, you know, Marlon does not rescue Nemo. No. Right. He's there for Nemo when he comes out of the, you know, into the harbor. Right. Out of the sink.

2:34:24David Sims:But also, Dory is correct. Like, Dory gets them out of the fucking world. Dory's been talking to the whale this whole time. Whales don't speak— She talks like these. And I think whales don't speak the same language as all the other fish, because they're, again, like the tulkoons, sort of like on this elevated plane of intelligence, the same way that we can't speak the same language of whales, but whales do have language. Yes. So that's sort of what's happening here in my mind. She's communicating with the whale. The whale is like, you need to do the counterintuitive thing, which is fall down into my throat so that I could then blow you out.

2:34:53I've driven you to Sydney.

2:34:54David Sims:I'm dropping you off. Which is also what teaches Marlin to trust Nemo in Nemo's escape. That she's doing the counterintuitive thing. Why would you go deeper into the whale? And Nemo similarly is not trying to swim up out of the net. No, he's got to swim down. That's how we're going to escape this thing. He learns about swimming down also because, yeah, when the fish have to get scooped out, usually to be sent to their doom at the hands of Darla, it's in a little net and if a lot of them are in the net they can break it.

2:35:27Griffin Newman:And Nemo you know the big transformation is he knows what to do he persuades Marlin to let him do it Marlin you know lets him do it Marlin has the wherewithal to let him do it

2:35:39David Sims:and they escape. It's the story thing I love across the Toy Story movies that also feels very influenced by Indiana Jones where you set out like here's the clear plan this is what needs to happen and the order of actions that will get us to the other side of this thing. And then immediately shit goes wrong and your characters have to improvise. But it's like a heist movie where you're so trained into how this is supposed to go that it's exciting every time they have to veer off of the plan. And the movie is telegraphing the all drains lean to the ocean thing so loudly throughout as like if they can just get there, then they're in the clear.

2:36:18David Sims:They're safe. it is a thing that Pixar people have talked about that there were a lot of incidents after this movie came out of kids flushing fish down the toilet it's like they're not making it to the harbor ban they thought that was the humanitarian act oh no fish shells went way up after this movie of course and like aquarium attendance I feel like permanently went up after this movie but there was a lot of kids trying to free fish by flushing them down I do think there's a very beautiful of its time sort of Y2K frutiger arrow. Vivid blue and orange like aesthetic to the whole thing that feels like it was big at the time.

2:36:58Those are the two best colors.

2:37:00Griffin Newman:Let's go Mets. I also like calling this frutiger arrow. Is that how you say it? Frutiger arrow? Sure. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes, I know what you're talking about. Like that one windows background. Just hyper vivid. Also a little frutopia. I miss it. Oh, frutopia I miss. That is like crush and squirt vibe. Yes, that's true. I miss my, like, Windows 98. Bring it back. Bring it back. Also, a good reason for them to be clownfish is the blue-orange contrast is the best contrast. So. Did you know if you ate a clownfish that it would be gross because they're covered in a special mucus to protect them from the anemones that they live in?

2:37:35Griffin Newman:Anemone. All right, kid, don't knock yourself out. No, and then we're done. Like, I mean, right? Like, it's like. We skipped over. Right, you think you're in the clear when he escapes.

2:37:46David Sims:But the tank gets super fucking dirty. Austin Pendleton's freaking the fuck out. Can't you see that we're all surrounded by shit, which they cut him off? Yeah, she goes, shh, because the dentist is coming in. And he takes his reader's digest into the bathroom. Right. Yeah, is that when that happens? Yes, yes. And the kid in the waiting room is reading The Incredibles comic. I don't know if you noticed that. And there's a little buzz light you're in the toy chest. Yeah. But the thing they didn't account for is that he would just buy some new high-tech cleaner and install it while they were sleeping.

2:38:15David Sims:that he doesn't need to take that out or he took him out but put him back in really quickly. So they wake up, the tank is clean, all hope is lost. Right. It does not know that Dory and Marlon have gotten so close. And today is the day that Darla is coming and she's going to take Nemo and shake him until he dies.

2:38:36Griffin Newman:Yeah. She even gets her hands on him. I mean, she's got him for a second. She gives him a hearty shake. She's like the opposite. I think a lot of the depiction of Australia in this was this and, you know, Kangaroo Jack were like my only exposure to Australia in the first decade of life. And it so goes against the lovely, intelligent children of Bluey. Darla makes it seem like the children of Australia are monsters. I do think it's vital in Bluey that Bluey is a relatively obnoxious child. Yeah, but she's not. She's not bad. Darla is like... Oh no, Darla's much worse. But I mean, like... I mean, I just...

2:39:13Wait, at one point, a character with an Australian accent calls Dory Bluey at one point.

2:39:19Griffin Newman:Well, she is blue. She is blue. But, you know, in Bluey, like, one of my favorite episodes of Bluey, a hugely controversial episode, is the one where... Ellen comes out? The puppy episode. They're all puppy episodes of Bluey. This is true. Is the one where Bingo, you know, first they both turn into Blueys, right? Bingo turns into Bluey, like Bingo paints herself blue. I don't know about this. It's so good. It's called Mini Bluey. Why is it controversial? I'll tell you in one second. So Bingo turns herself into Bluey and Bluey's like, this is what it's like if you're Bluey. And essentially it's like, you need to be more obnoxious.

2:39:50Griffin Newman:Like you are not, like you are the good sister. I'm the more annoying sister. It's like blah, blah, blah. Don't listen to dad when he tells you to do something right. Ignore people, be a little bossy, make weird noises, yada, yada, yada. And they do that for a while. And then Bluey's like, this is boring. How about I be Bingo? And so they both turn into Bingo. Bluey paint. And then, you know, they're being nice and helpful. And the dad goes, this rocks. Good result. This is great. and then Bluey's really upset. Like Bluey gets upset and they, you know, they have to resolve like, you know, that, you know, Bingo's like, I'm also annoying.

2:40:21Griffin Newman:Like Bingo helps her. Bingo is a much sweeter kid. But like Bingo's basically like, of course, like they think that, but like I'm also annoying and weird and demonstrates how. But then the episode does end with the dad being like, but it did kind of rock when she was being Bingo, right? And a lot of fans don't like it because it's like, it's not an example of amazing parenting. Like the dad never really apologizes. There can't be these perfect parents all the time. That's why I love it. The issue with the bluey parents is they're too perfect. So we need these moments. Anyway, where are we in this?

2:40:51David Sims:Here's the thing I like in the movie, and I like this just when movies can give me this feeling, where you feel like it's wrapping up, and you're like, it's a shame I've been having fun. I guess if it's time to end, it's time to end, but I could watch some more of this. And there's basically a fake-out denouement, right? Oh, yeah. Darla's here, ticking clock, it's coming to a head. Marlon and Dory have made it, like, basically right. In Nigel's mouth, which was another moment of learning to trust because he's like, you need to hop in my mouth. Simplified, this is the only thing the other Pelican needs to accomplish is just being a basically non-speaking rival for like three minutes.

2:41:31And they're all like lads who are perched above a fish and chips stand.

2:41:34David Sims:We also need to call out the mine sequels who we haven't even talked about yet. Right. Which we're also, you say Bruce is a breakout star. The seagulls were huge. Oh, humanious.

2:41:43Griffin Newman:Yeah, seagull. Mine?

2:41:44David Sims:Mine? Mine? It's so funny. It's very funny. It's just another really good identification of like, what do seagulls feel like to us when we see them? Right. Yeah. So, and also, Nemo's playing dead. Yes. So that he'll get flushed down the toilet. And that's what Marlon and Dory come in on. So they think Nemo's - The dentist is scooping him to give to Darla. Gil's final advice is to play dead. Yeah. He wants to get to the drain. But yes, there's like this tension of Nigel getting Marlon Dory to the window. They make it there just in time to see what they think is Nemo dead on the counter. So they give up.

2:42:26David Sims:Nemo wakes up. Gil recognizes the panic of this moment and does what is potentially the sacrifice of load me into the volcano. Another thing we've set up in the movie that doesn't feel like it's going to be a sort of mechanic for action. Right. It was just sort of a fun gag that they could make the volcano. Right. That's just part of the ritual. But then we've shown that, like, it's not actually dangerous. But of course, yes, you could launch yourself from that. So they all work together and they launch Gil over to the dentist tool tray. Right. Who uses basically the tools to break Nemo's bag to be able to let Nemo flip into the drain of the dentist spit sink.

2:43:04David Sims:but it's too late in the sense that Marlon and Dory think it's too late. Yes, they think he's dead. So Nemo is flushed to sea, and Marlon and Dory are back in the ocean, and Nigel also thinks Nemo's gone, and it's like, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I truly am. His second, I'm sorry, truly am, really gets to me. The gravity of it. Yeah, and then he just fucking flies away, and Marlon has his lowest moment of just like, Like, I mean, genuine grief. Yeah. He's crossed the ocean. He came so close. His son is dead. And he's like, Dory, we're going our separate ways. He's not even angry at Dory at this point.

2:43:44David Sims:Yeah. But it's just like, it's over. It's fucking over. The beautiful thing about like, I don't want to keep forgetting when I'm with you with this relationship I'm able to remember. And he's like, I don't want to remember. When I'm with you, I'm home. Yeah. Yeah. She makes her big plea and it falls on deaf ears because he's just going through too fucking much, which leaves her alone. This is where you're like, I felt like the movie was about to end, but now they're all split up again. Where's the movie even going? What moves does it still even have? And it's, oh, Nemo can bump into Dory and Dory cannot understand what that means.

2:44:17Yeah.

2:44:18David Sims:Yeah, that's true. So at first, Nemo very sweetly is like, oh, like, are you lost? Yeah, right, right. It's very cute. He sees, he's just escaped from like the most perilous situation ever. He's seen more than any little baby fish should. But he wants to take care of her. Yeah, he's immediately like, okay, like, I'll help you. He sees she's in distress. Right. And once again, like, if Marlon had listened to Dory's plea, he would have been reunited with his son in five minutes. Yeah. Right. So Marlon goes away. There's these crabs who are fun. Dory doesn't remember. You have the moment of, like, Nemo.

2:44:51David Sims:That's a nice name. Yeah. Oh, really funny. Yeah. Perfectly played. And then what is it that helps her remember again? um it's like a flashback yeah but what triggers the p sherman 42 wallaby way sydney because she has the moment where it all comes flooding back or like kaiser soze moment i'm trying to remember what the verbal trigger is um i don't remember okay well so that the fact that we're forgetting no no it's metatextual that we don't remember and it will come to us in a in a flashback and it'll be like a parallel and whatever. Yeah. So that happens. She remembers and they need to find Marlon.

2:45:31David Sims:Yeah. Right. And Marlon's just sort of following the school of fish. Right. I mean, you could argue he's borderline suicidal at this moment. So there's this big school of fish and they're all like, hey, watch where you're going. They're like really dour. He's sort of caught up in that. They briefly reunite. It's the pipe. I'm sorry. It's the pipe where the crabs are looking to catch the fish. Yeah, that come out. And it says Sydney on it. Oh, right. She sees that. She reads it. There you go. And P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney comes back to her. Yeah, and then she's like, oh, Nemo. And she's hugging him with her little fins.

2:46:07There's this big school of fish.

2:46:09David Sims:And I'm sorry, but just incredible Ellen DeGeneres line delivery. She does her similar, like, seven thoughts in one sentence. We thought you were dead, and you're not, and your father, your father. her one kind of scolding look. Yeah, while she's like squishing his face. It's really cute. She's really good. But we see this school of fish where they've just reunited. Up above on the shore, there's a fishing trawler that's going

2:46:33Griffin Newman:This is right, the net. Yeah, it's going to drop a big net and scoop up all of these fish.

2:46:40David Sims:Yeah. And Nemo's the only one who can basically save everybody. Right. Oh, no, because Dory gets caught up in it. Yes. And Marlin is now, even though he just, he He realizes his mistake from abandoning Dory. He's not going to lose her again. So it's like, we need to get her out of there and free all the fish. Nemo goes inside and Marlon has just got his son back. And he's like, you cannot do this. But then it's like, you know what? You need to trust me. I know that you can. Yeah. And it's you've already had their moment of reunion. So it's what's impactful is that Marlon has just gotten him back.

2:47:17David Sims:and he so quickly accepts that he needs to trust him and let him go for another moment. Yeah. So he schools all the fish, huh? Uh-huh. So true. To swim down. This is based on a real event. Yes.

2:47:33Griffin Newman:That Stanton read about in the news. There was some event where a school of fish seemed to somehow figure out how to beat a net. To break the net. Right.

2:47:42David Sims:Which is another great, like, oh, shit, if you're telling me that happened for real,

2:47:46Griffin Newman:or at least someone claims it. Movie's over, right? I mean, like, we end up back at the school and all that.

2:47:54David Sims:Excuse me. My opening quote, another moment that makes me cry, where he's looking at Nemo, who has succeeded in freeing all the fish, but he's lying kind of knocked out at the bottom of the ocean floor, at least this tier of the ocean floor, right? Oh, yeah, this is real. And you have the mirroring of him going to Nemo and cradling him like the egg. and then to console him as he's like half awake, you know?

2:48:17Griffin Newman:Yeah.

2:48:18David Sims:He tells him the Sandy Plankton thing. Right.

2:48:21Griffin Newman:Yeah, it's a lovely moment. To me, the lovely moment is when he gets information.

2:48:25David Sims:When he gets the what?

2:48:26Griffin Newman:When he's like, how old are you? And Crush goes, 150, dude. Like, that just makes me cry. But see, it's the payoff of it for me. The payoff's good, too.

2:48:34David Sims:Both are incredible. Both are so sweet. But the fact that he's able to tell him that and that he knows that and that he understands the value of having experiences and learning things for yourself. And that's what he like yells at Nemo about, which is so funny. His genuine frustration of why do you still give a shit about Sandy Plankton is both very funny and very emotional. Albert Brooks saying the name Sandy Plankton to very important SpongeBob characters. Yes, good call. He just delivers it in a really funny way. It's very sweet. And then you cut forward basically to their new found family unit.

2:49:12David Sims:Right. They're back at the anemone. And now it's Marlon jumping on Nemo because he's excited for him to go to school.

2:49:21Griffin Newman:There's also a make credit scene where the tank gang does escape. Which is fine. Yes. Oh, and Squirt's an exchange student now. Oh, that's right. Hey, man. Best. I just want to say this right now.

2:49:33David Sims:But it was part of the reason why I was so concerned when they announced they were even making a sequel is this movie does end just perfectly.

2:49:42Griffin Newman:It does, but it's not like the Monsters, Inc. ending where you're like, I truly don't know what you do.

2:49:46David Sims:No.

2:49:46Griffin Newman:Finding Nemo does end with like, they live in the ocean and are friends. They could have another adventure.

2:49:51David Sims:It's Nemo swimming back to hug him and say, I love you, and then swimming off and Marlon saying, I love you too, son, at a distance. You know, that he says it to himself kind of. Yeah. It's good. Yeah. He says,

2:50:04Griffin Newman:go have an adventure. And Nemo says, okay.

2:50:06David Sims:but the last line is yeah I love you too

2:50:09Griffin Newman:yeah dad stuff right before Nemo dad stuff right before Nemo got taken away he said I hate you exactly with like full force to his dad guys I hear you I love this movie I will say it does not quite activate my parent buttons in the way you guys seem to be that is interesting but like not in like a way where I'm immune to does it activate your child of a parent button is it more like the opposite identification no I just like it because it's about fish and Dory's so funny it's pretty awesome But I think all of the stuff you're saying is very well done. Like, I'm not, you know, but it doesn't, this movie doesn't like.

2:50:42I'm like, it's about how secure attachment styles are formed. Yes. In the crucial early years of life.

2:50:50David Sims:Yes. I also need to correct myself. He does the swim back, love you. But then he just says bye, dad, while on Mr. Ray yelled out at a distance. And then Marlon says bye, son, very quietly to himself. Right. The end. Beautiful. Fucking Robbie Williams, Beyond the Sea Oh yeah, baby

2:51:07Griffin Newman:Obviously, famously If you see this movie What's the language where the end is Sloot What? So there's a language right at the end It comes up on the screen and just says slut Slut And that became an old Twitter or YouTube Of the end of YouTube But then it just goes slut Well then wouldn't that happen In like a hundred movies Yes, but it's just especially funny in Nemo. Also, most movies don't say the end of the end anymore. No, kids movies definitely do. It's Swedish. That is awesome. I will find it now.

2:51:45David Sims:Do you know, speaking of languages, this is only the second movie ever that was dubbed into Navajo. That's amazing. Whoa. Here we go.

2:51:56Griffin Newman:See, here's the ending. Water. We're looking at the shot. It does just say slut. In fact, it does just say slug. Best supporting actress of 2003. Here were the Oscar nominees. I want to say this right now. The nominees were Renee Zellweger for Cold Mountain. One. Unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. Shoray Agadosh for House of Sand and Fog. Lovely nomination. Mediocre movie. Patricia Clarkson for Pieces of April. Better in the station agent, but still pretty good.

2:52:26David Sims:Yeah, that's a weird one where that movie doesn't exist, but there was a moment of, hey, Patricia Clarkson's always been She has two great performances this year. Let's give her a lifetime kind of... You pick. Yeah. In the Peace of April, she has cancer or whatever.

2:52:39Griffin Newman:It's a little more...

2:52:39David Sims:But a totally forgotten movie.

2:52:41Griffin Newman:She's somewhat forgotten. She's good. Marcia Gay Harden and Mystic River. Kind of an odd nom. She's not bad in it. Yeah. Holly Hunter in 13. A very good performance because she's a good actor in a very sort of over-rob movie. Yeah. Ellen DeGeneres is better than all of those performances, like by far. Like it's not even a question.

2:52:58David Sims:Did BAFTA nominate her? No. I know they nominated Eddie Murphy.

2:53:01Griffin Newman:I think they flirted with it, but she might have made a long list or something. She got a couple of, like she won the Saturn, but the Saturns are a little.

2:53:10David Sims:She got a couple of critics award, like Chicago nominated her. There were a lot of critics saying like, this is the time to finally do this. And this still has not happened. It still has not happened. A vocal performance?

2:53:22Griffin Newman:No. There are very few that are at the level that deserve it. It is the kind of transformative performance that I think the Oscars, especially when you hear those five names. Yes.

2:53:31David Sims:No offense to them. No, but that's like a pretty... Good actor's all. Well, the empty circus film was also a big thing at the time, right? Yeah, yeah. That was also a big thing. Yeah. But that's also like motion.

2:53:41Griffin Newman:We did get an Oscar for animated film, obviously. It was nominated for screenplay. It got four nominations. Sound and music, I think. The music, the score is beautiful.

2:53:52David Sims:It's Newman's best score. I was going to ask you. Because I know sometimes you can be a little snarky about Newman.

2:53:57Griffin Newman:He has a thing that he does. Yes. And I enjoy the thing that he does, but I do feel that he, you know, you kind of know what you're getting with a Newman score. I think this is his best score.

2:54:07David Sims:I agree with you. I think so. It is a secret power of this movie just that even though he and Randy Newman are part of the same lineage, that all the Pixar movies musically sounded so similar and this one starts so differently. And when you hear the opening strands of the Thomas Newman score over the anemone house hunting scene at the beginning, you're immediately like, oh, Thomas Newman's whole thing he does all the time sounds like the ocean. It does. There is no better fit for his style.

2:54:36Griffin Newman:It's 100%. Obviously Lord of the Rings won that year and that is very, very, very good music. But Howard Shore already won for the first. But you have to give it to him for return. It has the beacon lighting. Like it just, it has the most like bravura shit he ever did. They didn't give it to him for two towers? No, they didn't give it to him.

2:54:56David Sims:Who won an O2? Let's find it. Because also the hours...

2:54:59Griffin Newman:Let's travel through time to the Oscars.

2:55:01David Sims:I keep being corrected that the hours didn't win and wasn't nominated. No, right, because that's the Frida year.

2:55:06Griffin Newman:Golden Fultz swipes it from glass. Interesting. I think this is... Incredible year because Catch Me If You Can is also nominated. The wonderful Elmer Bernstein score for Far From Heaven. And Thomas Newman's very nice Road to Perdition score.

2:55:20David Sims:I love that score. Very nice. But this feels like a real... They fucked themselves by not giving it to Thomas Newman. in the year where it made the most sense. And now they're just constantly living in the shadow of how many nominations they've given him. Yes. And the idea that he's maybe never going to have a moment as clear cut as this one again.

2:55:37Griffin Newman:I wonder.

2:55:39David Sims:Score's incredible. Script's incredible. I feel, and I feel like this is the point you're making.

2:55:44Griffin Newman:What was that?

2:55:46David Sims:Even with the anti-animation, you know, stigmas. This is a year where, like, WALL-E becomes a breaking point in 2008. Right. We'll talk about in that episode that as much as Dark Knight, I would argue, leads to the expansion of the 10. It was part and parcel. But this is a year where people were really like, do we have to nominate Finding Nemo? And it felt like the conversation couldn't get traction, even though everyone sort of sensed like this feels as important as Beauty and the Beast and sort of signaling a change in the industry on top of it being such a seismic success. in a year without Lord of the Rings where you didn't have a more obvious blockbuster film, maybe this would have gotten in.

2:56:28David Sims:But even with the anti-voice actor prejudice, I feel like fucking Ellen DeGeneres was like seven or eight on the list. Might have been. And part of that's just how weird and kind of weak that supporting actress field was. But you're right. It does feel egregious that she couldn't beat any of those five. I agree.

2:56:48Griffin Newman:I was transitioning, but then I wanted to interject quickly. I never saw this movie before.

2:56:53David Sims:What? That's insane. But it's the wettest movie. It's true. It is the wettest film. When I was talking about how adults would go see this film, you were giving me a look like you were holding something back.

2:57:05Griffin Newman:Yeah. It's so sweet. I loved it. I guess it makes sense that you weren't in the market for Finding Nemo at the time.

2:57:13David Sims:You were just enough older than us, and you've also talked about your sort of like teenage, like fuck the mainstream. I only saw it because I was like a nerdy film fan.

2:57:23Griffin Newman:Like, right. I had no reason to see it otherwise. 2003, that summer, is when I graduated from high school. Right. Pretty cool. Now, I will say I'm somewhat similar to Dory. Mm-hmm.

2:57:35David Sims:Because at that point, I had already really dove headfirst into a lifestyle that has led to memory loss. Ben has written this out. He's reading from a prepared statement. I'm not making fun of you for that. I just think you're saying, I want people to know the level of intentionality with which you're speaking right now. But I think it's long, long-term memory. Oh, sure. Yeah. The short-term stuff you remember, the bits. But we should, I think, introduce the podcast. Oh, sure. This is Blank Check with Griffin and David.

2:58:08Griffin Newman:I'm Griffin. Swish. I want to point out as I'm sure Griffin you already know that every Pixar movie before this one had come out in November that was the Pixar spot yep and originally this was planned for November 2 but possibly because of sort of the aesthetic of the movie right summer they're like

2:58:28David Sims:no May 30th there are also a couple other things that factor into that right one is I think they didn't want this not getting stuck in a rut thing we've talked about the other thing that's happening around this time is Lasseter goes out and poaches Brad Bird, who now is sort of orphaned after Warner Brothers animation has collapsed. Right. And part of that was we're worried about repeating ourselves. We need to get someone else in to shake this up and change the pattern. And they talk about a little bit like Lilo and Stitch being seen as the secondary film. Redheaded stepchild or whatever. While Treasure Planet was the main focus.

2:59:05David Sims:Right, right. that everyone was so fucking amped up about Incredibles. And it was like, we got Brad Bird. He's a genius. The script is perfect. We're making an action film. It's a little bit older. That Nemo's sort of slipping through the cracks a little bit is seen as less exciting and less sexy. But there's also this thing that Disney is sort of pushing on Pixar, which is if the movie comes out in May, we can sell merchandise in May, have the home video release come out around Thanksgiving, make it the number one Christmas gift, and do a second wave of merchandise in December. Sure. Which basically Eisner pushes on them as like, it's big to be a holiday film.

2:59:45David Sims:But now that we know that Pixar is basically a proven brand and the movie is going to hit no matter what, we'll make more money on these characters if you release earlier. And most of the Pixar movies swing to summer after this. Famously, what were you going to say? No, what were you going to say? Famously what? There's the original Pixar deal after Toy Story where they sign them up for five films. Yes. There'll be an autonomous company, but Disney has distribution rights and will own the characters in perpetuity. Right. And those five films are supposed to be Monsters, Inc., Nemo, Incredibles, Cars, and A Bug's Life.

3:00:21David Sims:I forgot the first one chronologically. Where they get fucked on this deal is they said sequels don't count. We want you to make Toy Story 2 right away, but sequels don't count. That's going direct to video. Right. When they up it to theaters, Lasseter goes, so that's one of our five films. And Eisner goes, no, we get that for free because it was meant for video. What a jerk. That leads to the tensions between Pixar and Disney that made people think when they're done with the fifth film, which is going to be Cars, they're going to leave. Every film was more successful than the previous film. They kept outgrossing themselves.

3:00:57David Sims:and everyone around Eisner at Disney was like, you got to do what you, anything you can do to make good with Pixar now because we can't lose them. Right. And what Eisner kept saying was, they're going to fail at some point. One of these movies is going to flop and then we're going to own their asses because they're not going to have negotiating leverage. And he was really confident that Nemo was the one. Well, he was wrong. He kept saying to people, this one's not as commercial. Fish aren't going to sell as much merchandise. even if it's just down a little bit they're weaker and they'll come begging us and that basically like puts the death knell on Eisner it's a big part of why he's pushed out of the company that he fucks that up with his arrogance and that's a little bit I think why they wanted to go to Summer to see like if whatever but the other part of the story is that it was seen as the secondary film no one was confident about it there were these big fucking like CinemaCon and licensing, you know, conventions where they have to go and sell these movies years in advance in order to get people on board with them for merchandise and for, you know, the theater partners and whatever.

3:02:06David Sims:And there was one of these where they didn't have enough footage to show or it wasn't a good enough state. And the movie had a bit of a stink around it because Eisner kept shit talking it and they need to go combat it. And they sent Andrew Stanton out and he basically performed the movie for 40 minutes similar to the pitch that he did for Lassiter and everyone walks out of that being like that's the fucking biggest hit that that shit the way he told the story and did all the voices and the emotions it's like Nigel telling the story to Nemo truly and you can see it on it's on the DVD and the Blu-ray and the fucking iTunes extras there's like a super cut of the moments of him doing that well but he basically just kind of willed this movie into not being totally disregarded because disney kept trying to like slide it over and anyone who was engaging with it was like it feels like this thing has the juice it opens to 70 million dollars cumulacus biggest hit their career in their time so far monsters inc did 62

3:03:07Griffin Newman:ends at 339 domestic 871 worldwide it's made more now with re-releases and stuff the 3d re-release

3:03:15David Sims:which Stan oversaw is what convinced him to finally do Finding Dory but it also added basically another hundred million dollars to the gross. Or something else

3:03:23Griffin Newman:convinced Finding Dory.

3:03:24David Sims:We'll talk about it.

3:03:26Griffin Newman:It's number one at the box office on May 30th. Number two is the film that was number one the week before. No.

3:03:32David Sims:Matrix has been out for I think three plus weeks. Okay. Let me go through May in my head. So the opening movie of the summer is X2 X-Men United. That is number seven. Then Matrix comes out the following weekend. Matrix Reloaded is number four.

3:03:45Griffin Newman:And no, I think it was two weeks between them.

3:03:47David Sims:Okay. And then the next May blockbuster. It's a huge comedy.

3:03:51Griffin Newman:Oh, it's Bruce Almighty. Got a yo-yo.

3:03:54David Sims:That's the earth. Like also open to 70 million? Huge, huge hit. This month was through the roof.

3:03:59Griffin Newman:America was just doing great.

3:04:01David Sims:Yeah.

3:04:02Griffin Newman:Movies were doing great. America was actually doing horrible.

3:04:04David Sims:You basically had four consecutive$70 million opening weekends.

3:04:08Griffin Newman:I remember it so well. It was my IMDb Pro era. Right. My mom got a subscription for work. Yeah. And so I had it, and I had such good box office imagery and stuff. And I just remember Bruce. Terrible movie.

3:04:19David Sims:Yeah, awful. It's a bad movie. But it was the biggest comedy opening weekend of all time. Matrix had a five day. So three day was a little smaller, but it opened over 100 if you count the five day. Nemo's the biggest animation opening in history. X-Men was the biggest super show opening. Yeah, you got pirates coming down the pike later summer.

3:04:38Griffin Newman:Hell yeah. Oh, those crazy pirates. Bad Boys 2. Bad Boys 2, Terminator 3. Yeah. But yeah, number three at the box office. Opening against Nemo. Slightly underwhelming in its opening, but I think it kind of legged out a pretty good gross. Italian job. It's Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron in the Italian job. Was a sleeper. It made it to 100. In my memory, it's pretty fun. It's fun. I've not seen it in 20 years.

3:05:03David Sims:It looked like dog shit, and everyone was like, why would they remake this? And then it kind of was a word of mouth.

3:05:08Griffin Newman:In Britain, it was seen as kind of like a national crime.

3:05:10David Sims:This is offensive.

3:05:11Griffin Newman:Yeah. It was like you're making one of our things. You already did get Carter. Why are you kicking us even further? I find the British obsession with the Italian job a little insane. Like that movie is basically like boring until the end, which does rock.

3:05:24David Sims:Okay.

3:05:25Griffin Newman:Like the stuff with the minis is great. That's mostly not the movie. Interesting. But it's pretty fun. Do you like the Italian job with Mark Wahlberg and Edward Norton and Charlie Theron and Moe Staff and whoever else? I can't say I've ever seen it. I remember it being huge. And back when Canada's Wonderland was Paramount Canada's Wonderland, there was an Italian job coaster where you were riding in the Mini Coopers.

3:05:49David Sims:David, Canada's Wonderland, a theme park that used to be Paramount branded and is not anymore, has like 10 rides that are all clearly connected to Paramount movies, but they lost the license and now they're just generic. Yeah. So Top Gun is now like flight deck. Right. And the Italian job one is called like Stunt Track or something. Yeah. And Tomb Raider is called like Temple Explorer. Yeah. There was a Wayne's World coaster at one point called the Hurlenator. OK, that I don't know about. That's awesome. Yeah, I'm trying to think what the other ones are. But that park is very funny for that reason.

3:06:21David Sims:Yeah, the Italian job is called Backlot Stunt Coaster. The big icon of the park instead of like the Disney castle is like the Paramount Mountain. And now they're just like, it's a mountain. But yes, the Italian job roller coaster still has Mini Coopers. and they were like, it's just one of those chase sequences from any Hollywood movie.

3:06:38Griffin Newman:Yeah, I see it right here.

3:06:39David Sims:Well, you're not going to change them. No.

3:06:42Griffin Newman:Number five of the box office is a film you've seen many times. Many, many, many times.

3:06:46David Sims:It's specifically one of my movies?

3:06:48Griffin Newman:You don't like it, but you've seen it. Maybe you like it. You don't love it.

3:06:52David Sims:I don't love it, but I've seen it. Your sister loved this movie. I do think this movie is very good. This is way up on the list of the movies I have seen most in my life because my sister Romilly, past and future guest, longtime sister, was not a kid who obsessively watched the same thing over and over again, other than this one film, which for seven years was in constant rotation, is Eddie Murphy's Daddy Daycare. Oh, yeah. We've spoken about this because this was a similar thing where it's like I was watching this genuinely every single weekend at my friend's house. It's like, we're going to have a sleepover.

3:07:26It's we're going to watch Daddy Daycare.

3:07:27David Sims:I think Daddy Daycare is very funny, but it could be Stockholm Syndrome. It is a movie I will defend as like, no, that one's actually well written and it has a good cast, but also I've seen it so many times that if I didn't find it funny, I wouldn't have been able to survive.

3:07:45Griffin Newman:Number six, opening this weekend new, is my favorite Eliza Dushku horror franchise, Long Turn, which Wikipedia calls the first installment in the Wrong Turn series. It's like, let's relax.

3:07:57David Sims:What's your second favorite Hurtilize a Dushku horror franchise. Out of curiosity.

3:08:01Griffin Newman:All those other ones she's done. I do love Dushku, though. Who doesn't love a little Dushku? Yeah, douche it up. Number seven is X2. Are you a douchebag? What do you say? You self-identify as a douchebag. Huge douchebag. Number seven is X2. Number eight is The In-Laws. So that's with Albert Brooks, right? Yeah, bombing at the same time. Big bomb. Yeah, huge bomb. Number nine is another bomb, but a great film. Down with Love. Love. And number 10 is probably the most important cultural text of 2003, the Lizzie McGuire movie. Yeah. Oh my God. You made the mistake of opening it against X2. What a summer that was.

3:08:34The summer of the Lizzie McGuire movie.

3:08:36David Sims:Hey now, hey now. This is what dreams are made of. Oh yeah. The only risk in taking an adventure is not taking it at all. I have a very defined Sort of the Finding Nemo message. A real kind of defining memory of all the girls in my grade going to see Lizzie McGuire movie that Friday, opening day. same day that X2, X-Men United came out. And the girls were angry that none of the boys wanted to go see Lizzie McGuire. And I, quite a big fan of the X-Men. And I remember the girls in my grade basically being like, if you come see the Lizzie McGuire movie with us, someone will make out with you. Did anyone?

3:09:15David Sims:No, I didn't go see it. Of course, I went to X2, X-Men United. X2, X-Men, the X-Men are united in this film. I was like, I'm sorry, you don't understand what you're up against here. You have no leverage in this conversation. This, too, was a pretty exciting day. Yeah. That was pretty cool. I was like nightcrawlers in this one.

3:09:30Griffin Newman:I know. And it was just kind of that thing of, like, the first one worked, so they're going to get to be a little, like, more off the leash with this one.

3:09:36David Sims:I was like, you could promise me that Jessica Alba would make out with me, and I wouldn't go see the Lizzie McGuire movie right now. It was a woman herself. Can we talk about theme parts, please? So, a couple of very important things. It was revolutionary at the time, turtle talk with crush. So, Epcot has the second largest research aquarium in the country is within Epcot. It is something that Disney does not take enough advantage of. It's a wonderful little aquarium. And I think of interest to David, was basically seen as on the chopping block in the early 2000s. All this educational, scientific shit is lame.

3:10:09David Sims:We got to get characters back in here. They have rescue manatees there. So they decided— The fact that they had a blockbuster fish movie saved all this shit. The Seas is now going to be rebranded as The Seas with Nemo and Friends. And one of the great attractions there is Turtle Talk with Crush. Yes. That's where I've seen videos of this. Yeah, it's really at the time. It was live puppeteering, basically. They had an animated model that could do crowd work. So the audience would be there. It's like, your name's Griffin. Wow. They had cameras. They'd make jokes about the guy wearing the silly hat.

3:10:40It's so cohesive because you're looking at all these fish tanks at the aquarium. And then you go to one that's like a fish tank, but it's a screen and it's Crush. And he makes jokes with all the kids and it's fun. there's also a little ride where you're riding in shells and the characters from Nemo are being projected onto windows into the real tanks.

3:10:57David Sims:But then there are also some sculptures and you're seeing real fish. It's like they kept using Nemo characters as the bait to get children to engage with real aquatic life. There's also I don't want to talk about it because it sucks, but they reskinned at Disneyland the submarine voyage ride with Nemo stuff. I could not disagree more. This is one of my favorite attractions. I want to skip over that. It is one of my safe spaces. It's now called Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage. Yes. Convince Elevator Pitch. You go into a submarine that is on tracks. They make you feel like it's free floating, but you are genuinely underwater.

3:11:34David Sims:And then it is a technical marvel where you are going around in a loop while the Thomas Newman score soothes my anxiety. And you see a combination of real fish and like incredible projection where it looks like real animation is happening outside the window of the submarine. I'm going to be honest, you're selling me. But what was lost? Nothing was lost. It was just already kind of like a dull experience. Oh, you're anti. Adding the IP onto it doesn't. Yeah, it was more like... It's a unique ride mechanic. A big fake octopus attacks you and you have like a Jacques Cousteau style narrator just telling you about it.

3:12:11It's just funny because it's so... To most people, it would be very anxiety-inducing. You're going into a small claustrophobic capsule and going underwater.

3:12:19Griffin Newman:How many people are on the sub? It's a very slow-moving line.

3:12:23David Sims:Yeah. But you all have your own seat. The seat's faced in opposite directions. Everyone has their own little hole they get to look at. I think I would find it anxiety-provoking did it not have my good friends and the Thomas Newman score and the vibes and the colors. Maybe that's why I like it so much. It's 12 minutes. Yeah. That seems very long. I love these rides that are just like, I'm not answering. Shit's going to slow down. You just get to stay seated. Nothing's going to happen to your tummy. These are nice kind of refresh points in a theme park day. Yeah. Of like, I can just vibe out here.

3:12:58Yeah, and it's less overstimulating than like a small world or something.

3:13:01David Sims:Yes, I never skip it. The last thing I want to bring up, because I think it is one of the great achievements of the 21st century at the theme parks, which is at Animal Kingdom. Finding Nemo the musical. I think this is a really, really significant piece of theme park entertainment.

3:13:18Griffin Newman:Are you referring to the big blue and beyond? No, this is the re... So a few years ago, they were like, we need to cut down the runtime of Finding Nemo the musical. Just looking so I understand the context. That's a bastardized version.

3:13:28David Sims:40 minutes and now it's like 20 minutes. This was the first time Disney worked with Robert and Kristen Lopez. This is what's interesting about this, David. So they got them off of Avenue Q to be like, I know. David is hearing, while hearing. He's holding up big foam fingers and a pendant. My sign is so far away, Ben. The way that the stage uses the vertical space for these underwater creatures. It looks cool. It's some Julie Taymor style. You see the puppeteers visibly, but the puppets are in different ways worked around their bodies. The Nigel puppet is the most impressive, biggest thing. Outside of the King Kong musical, it's like that Nigel puppet is jaw-dropping and the song that they do for the Turtles is so good.

3:14:12It's like a Beach Boys type thing. And it's just awesome.

3:14:16David Sims:I also think Not My Dad is a great song. Nebo's Where's... Well, first it's Where's My Dad and then it's Not My Dad. Right, when Nigel tries to tell him the story. In the Big Blue World. Like these songs are genuinely for theme park entertainment. It is an excellent family musical. I don't understand why they've never tried to do it on Broadway. The Lopez is over-delivered on a theme park musical, which made Disney go like, oh, fuck, we got to have these people work on everything, which leads to obviously Frozen and Coco and all these other things. Yeah. I have never understood why they've never attempted to transfer this to Broadway.

3:14:47David Sims:Because even just like the visual approach, they cracked the code on how to make these characters work on stage. They cracked the puppets. The songs are good. I'm like, if you just doubled this length, and I'm sure they would just write more songs. Easily. Right. And there's so many good songs packed into it already. This thing would be a huge fucking hit. And instead of ever transferring it after like 15 years, they were like, let's make it shorter. And now it's like a 15 minute like greatest hits, a bridge version. Yeah, but I will never stop. Is that just to move people through?

3:15:16Griffin Newman:Like why a bridge? Maybe kids' attention spans nowadays and also probably some equity thing with the performers. Like this is a really, especially Crush's song. Yeah. For a guy to be singing that, it's tough on the vocal cords.

3:15:30David Sims:It looks like Crush's song is called Go With The Flow. It absolutely is. But David, theme parks love having shows like this that are successful because they're people eaters. They take pressure off the lines for the rides. If you can get someone to sit down for 40 minutes and if you can pack a house. And this was one of the few shows that people were like, this is actually good. It's not just kind of like a shitty restaging of, you know, there was the Aladdin.

3:15:55Griffin Newman:I know Becca has to go. I was going to say, you guys could just keep going. I feel like you guys can do this for another hour. Oh, God. I really do need to go soon. Have you ever been on Podcast the Ride? No, because I haven't been. How has that not happened? Well, we've spoken about it, but then, like, I don't know when I'm going to be in L.A. next.

3:16:10David Sims:Podcast the Right and Doughboys are the two that it feels like you have been inevitable on for years. And the schedules never line up. This is the beginning of my, like, life's wish triple crown. I feel like for you, like, being on Blank Check is an enjoyable lark.

3:16:25Griffin Newman:But, like, it's a mere stepping stone to Podcast the Right where you belong. No, no, no, no, no. You misunderstand. Okay, all right. I love Blank Check. Well, that's very nice of you. I love everything you do. A masterpiece of podcasts. It's a dream to be on the podcast that I like so much. Is there no other Nemo theme park stuff? Well, there's Crush's Coaster in Paris. There's a simulator in DisneySea. Oh, Crush's Coaster.

3:16:49David Sims:Yeah, Crush's Coaster. It's delightful. It's very good. It is the exact kind of ride you hate. It's a shell that's moving fast and spinning. You're in an indoor roller coaster.

3:16:58Griffin Newman:It's a mousy type ride. They play the kind of surf rocky.

3:17:01David Sims:Yes. Hey, I like that you knew the tour. Isn't that what they're called? Tiny mousy? A wild coaster? It's very fun. It doesn't sound fun to me. Yeah, but you would hate it. It's not like bullshit. Yes. What was the other thing you said? But they play the Thomas Noonan, like, surf rock score. The environment's very fun. They have lights and colors. Yeah, and that's in the bad part of Disneyland Paris, right? Although it's just now. They rebranded it. Now they have Olaf there. They have Aarindale. And children get to learn about death by watching Olaf power down in front of them. Oh, yeah, right.

3:17:29I saw that.

3:17:30David Sims:Falls down on a boat. Which is so Parisian. Parisian. It's so the ennui of they made an animatronic for Disneyland Paris who dies in front of you.

3:17:38Griffin Newman:I will say Crush's coaster doesn't look that intense. Yeah, it's a family coaster.

3:17:43David Sims:This is the other thing with Disney. Nothing is that intense, but that is as close to being a thrill ride as Disney gets, basically. Oh, disagree. What do you put higher? Even at that park, Indiana Jones is way more intense. I made the mistake of getting, my brother was living in France at the time, and I took him to Disney, and he showed up with his backpack and his laptop because he said, I'm going to have to just do some work at some point.

3:18:11Griffin Newman:Sounds like a brother.

3:18:11David Sims:And so he was really worried about the security of his laptop, and he was like, this thing isn't going to go upside down, right? And I was like, no, it's Disney. Nothing goes upside down. He was very angry at me at the end of that ride. Does it go upside down? It does. It's the mine cart rollercoaster. I'm watching it. It does one loop. I think so. One little saucy loop. He was holding onto his backpack for dear life. I will plug Bugvulture.com. Sure. And that's pretty much it. What do you mean? Popcorn bucket. They've canceled. They've canceled my ass. It's bullshit. That's bullshit. The man didn't want me speaking truth about Devil Wears Prada bucket shaped like a bag.

3:18:49David Sims:We tried to fucking. Michael Jackson bucket shaped like a hat. They don't want me revealing these stories. We were ashamed. And I'll say, tried to force the issue through Critical Darlings. Yeah, we really did. So actually, The video never released. Comment on all of Vulture's social media saying bring back the popcorn bucket reviews. The buckets still exist. I came in today asking Becca to do a bucket trade because I never got the Fantastic Car from Fantastic Four First Steps. And I said I would promise to trade her the F1 popcorn bucket that was supposed to be part of the Critical Darlings Oscar nominees segment year in review.

3:19:21David Sims:And Becca has made it clear that she does not want the F1 bucket. I have five Melania buckets on my desk. I don't know what to do with them. Those things. Talk about being worth negative comedy points. Yeah. Well. The Melania bucket. They make me laugh. Okay. Well, then that's all that matters.

3:19:35Griffin Newman:Does Lee Cronin's The Mummy have a bucket? I don't know. I don't know. I'm off the beat. They pulled me off the case. It's an injustice.

3:19:41David Sims:What if it was just Lee Cronin? That would be good. Just to honor his. Lee Cronin's The Popcorn. Yeah, exactly. Let's make it clear to our listeners. Let your voices be heard. Yes. Becca, previously on The Masthead, Chief Popcorn Critic. Yeah. Popcorn Bucket Critic. And we want this reinstated. We want the coverage back. Bring back Bucket. Yeah, but in the same way that you should all join Blank Check Patreon, you should subscribe to a magazine. Subscribe to a magazine.

3:20:12Griffin Newman:I'm a New York Magazine subscriber.

3:20:14David Sims:Hashtag bring back Becca's Buckets. Sure.

3:20:17Griffin Newman:And on the day of the release of this episode, June 21st, over on Patreon, RoboCop 2 is coming out. Oh, a movie I love as much as Finding Nemo. A movie, a commentary where we're kind of like, this isn't very good the whole time. Oh, I'm sorry. Can we take that again? We reveal our deepest secrets. I get pretty worked up. I don't want people to think I'm apathetic on that episode. No, no, no. You get pretty worked up. I get pretty worked up. But I think we're even-handed and fair about its flaws. I try not to be an asshole. Right. We're not just like shitting all over it. We're just kind of like, mm, mm.

3:20:46Griffin Newman:That's not right. My cousin shows up randomly that we've never talked about before. You should have led with that. And he kind of looks like me. You're doing like fun sweep sweep kind of stuff. Oh, yeah. Right. Joe Biden's the guest. Urkel. Urkel appears.

3:20:59David Sims:Right. We have Urkel. Stefan Urkel. Okay. Steve Urkel. Steve Urkel. And the Urkel bot all appear on the episode. Urkel bot is there. Take us out.

3:21:10Griffin Newman:When AJ recently plugged Urkel in our group chat.

3:21:14David Sims:No, did he? Yeah, he did. This is another thing I've been thinking. Interestant and AJ kind of look similar. Yeah, sure.

3:21:20Griffin Newman:Sure.

3:21:21David Sims:Got some AJ vibes.

3:21:22Griffin Newman:Yeah, a little bit. I mean, you're just talking about like a guy in a half zip with like hair. I mean, not to insult AJ, it's kind of like a normal looking guy.

3:21:29David Sims:Yeah. Yeah. AJ's very handsome, but he looks like the default video game avatar before you make me a decision.

3:21:35Griffin Newman:Right, he's your sim before you start doing stuff. Sorry. Sorry, AJ, you're very good looking. I prefaced it with very handsome. Everyone we employ is good looking. JJ especially. Stupid sexy JJ.

3:21:48David Sims:It actually sucks. I hated spending a weekend with his fucking hot ass coming to stand next to him.

3:21:55Griffin Newman:And former employee Nick texts me after meeting Ben being like, what's his skincare routine? I was like, Nick, why would I know? I mean, that is funny that he asked you. Ask Ben. I don't fucking know what he does. Here's my secret. I don't do shit. Yeah, that would have been my guess.

3:22:12David Sims:AJ and his family came into the city and we got lunch with AJ and his son. And he was telling me that he's into SNL now. AJ's son, who's like eight, I think. Sure. and so I was asking him about like which sketches he likes and which cast members he likes and I was like do you like Colin Jost and he went who's Colin Jost and AJ went the guy where where he comes on screen you point and go daddy dude dude someone at one of our live shows texted me

3:22:39Griffin Newman:like I think Colin Jost is here AJ is and I was like that's AJ like that's just AJ yeah so Colin

3:22:44David Sims:Jost Andrew Stanton AJ McKeon all on a spectrum I just want to establish this at the beginning of You guys are huge.

3:22:52Griffin Newman:Colin Jost came coming unannounced to sit in the... No, that's AJ.

3:22:55David Sims:I overheard Colin Jost talking about making edits to a Patreon episode. Why is he doing that? I'm going to pee. Take us out. Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. I'm very excited to be talking about the films of Andrew Stanton. I mean, few filmmakers we have ever covered or will ever cover more conform to the intro of this show. Directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion products they want. Sometimes those checks clear WALL-E and sometimes they bounce baby John Carter.

3:23:28David Sims:In three films, that's the whole fucking premise of this podcast. That's all. I just, I'm very excited to be doing this. And I'm very excited that we're going to talk about Toy Story 5 on main feed. And I'm very excited. And I'm glad that David's in the bathroom when I'm saying this so he doesn't get jealous that Forky's getting married in Toy Story 5. Forky's wedding Forky's wedding, Ben Forky's gonna make Karen Beverly an honest knife Tune in next week for WALL-E with David Ehrlich a man who has seen that film 800 times I think approximately and as always Forky is getting married

3:24:15David Sims:Okay, I'm just, I'm making these edits here, David. You're going to have to be Nemo.

3:24:20Griffin Newman:Okay.

3:24:21David Sims:Okay?

3:24:21Griffin Newman:Yeah. I think that's the lighter look. I've been born for that role. What do you mean? It's not the lighter look. You have to be Marlin. If you're not Marlin, it's a disaster. Correct. I mean, I think you should just do your Marlin line that you've been doing on this show for 11 years. Which is the, yeah. It's like, you think you can do these things, but you can't. You've said that so many times on Blank Chat. I think it's one of the best lines of screenwriting. Well, it's also like clearly your Brooks is like locked into that line. Yeah, it's my activator. Right. Yeah.

3:24:48David Sims:Blank Check with Griffin and David is hosted by...