Before Nemo touches the boat and Marlin berates him for doing so, Nemo quietly tells Marlin that he hates him. This becomes a tear jerker when you remember that in the very first scene, Marlin asked Coral if any of his kids would hate him, and Coral replied, "One of them is bound to like you."
Gil's a Moorish idol, a type of fish infamous for taking really poorly to captivity. If it wasn't a deliberate bonus on Pixar's part for viewers who would know, it's interesting to note. And an extra point of already strong irony for the Red Stapler Effect the movie suffered from.
Gil was voiced by Willem Dafoe, who also played Jesus Christ in The Last Temptation of Christ. It is known that the fish was a symbol of Christianity and a way for Christians to identify each other.
Why didn't Nemo's name trigger (fish pun!) Dory's memories? She kept forgetting it the entire way to Sydney! The fact that she can remember the "Fish are friends" pledge also shows that this time, it stuck.
Her memory only really started to "live on" after she started reading. She remembers what she reads, not so much what she hears. That's why Sydney triggered her memories and not Nemo. She'd never read the word Nemo.
On that note, why does Dory have short-term memory loss anyway? At first, I thought it was just elaborating on her character, but then I remembered that fish only have a memory span of three seconds! Granted, Dory's memory span is longer, but it was still some Fridge Brilliance for this troper.
Fish have a much longer memory span than just three seconds.
Yes. But to answer the question, the commentary claims that Dory's memory problem wasn't just to create a goofy sidekick, but to give Marlin a surrogate child-figure for his part of the story, just as Nemo had a surrogate father-figure for his part of the story.
Fish having a memory span of three seconds is a classic Animal Stereotype that Pixar probably intentionally played on.
The sequel reveals that Dory was born at the Marine Life Institute, if not captured while very young. In real life, there has never been a recorded instance of blue tangs successfully reproducing in captivity because scientists have yet to perfectly recreate the ideal environment for the fish to breed. Dory may just be a victim of a birth defect or arrested development caused by the artificial environment in which she was raised. Though that does cross into Fridge Horror when you realize just how lucky she is to be alive in the first place.
It's easy to miss, but when the dentist holds up Darla's picture to show it to Nemo, notice how his thumb is covering the image of the dead fish in the bag.
Why were Crush and the rest of the turtles there to save Marlin and Dory from the jellyfish swarm? Sea Turtles are predators of jellyfish in real life. That swarm would be the EAC's equivalent of a McDonald's for the turtles.
Actually, Crush and his turtle pack are Green Sea Turtles—which are herbivorous. Leatherbacks and loggerheads eat jellies.
Only adult green sea turtles are strict herbivores. Young ones tend to be carnivorous/omnivorous and will sometimes eat jellyfish, so the point still works.
Crush implies that his father is still alive when he tells Marlin "Mr. Turtle is my father."
That's actually a pretty common way of saying "there's no need to use formal titles." It doesn't necessarily imply anything about his actual father.
Why is Peach's gender still debated? IRL starfish are hermaphrodites! Not even the fact that she's voiced by Allison Janney helps matters!
As I was watching the movie the other night, I noticed that Nemo was given the nickname "Shark Bait" when he was initiated into tankhood. I started to notice that it's highly likely something similar happened to the other tank members and that their names are simply nicknames given to them from joining. For example, the tank gang gave the yellow fish the title "Bubbles" because, well, he likes bubbles.
The sharks' dislike of humans is understandable considering how humans kill hundreds of sharks each year mostly because they are afraid of them (thanks to a certain movie).
Chum hating on humans makes even more sense when you consider the fact that there's a giant hook stuck in his nose, making it likely that he's had personal experience with a human that had tried to kill him.
And speaking of dolphins, remember the addendum to the "Fish are friends, not food" pledge: "Except stinkin' dolphins!" Dolphins are actually mammals, while sharks are cartilaginous fish. Maybe Bruce and his pals consider eating other fish to be cannibalism, which is why dolphins are still fair game. Plus, sea mammals including dolphins are a major part of a large predatory shark's diet anyways (they offer a lot of fat for nutrition).
Marlin's extreme overprotectiveness makes even more sense if you consider that male clownfish have to be exhaustively-good parental caregivers: the females are bigger and will kick them out of the anemone if they're not.
This brings a whole new meaning to his willingness to please Coral and earn her approval in the prologue: she's the matriarch in the family.
According to All There in the Manual, Nigel is seen as weird by other pelicans because he's into dentistry. Why would that be? Because pelicans don't have teeth, so dentistry is pretty much useless for them!
Dory is such an optimist because her short-term memory loss prevents her from remembering any interactions or experiences that would jade her, so she still, more or less, has the innocent naiveté of a child because she can't remember many mishaps or mistakes to learn from.
At the menu of the DVD, Dory says that she "always wanted to be in a film", even though, as Marlin points out, she was in that very film. It could just be that she forgot, but maybe she just isn't aware that it's a film, but Marlin is. And maybe she doesn't catch on from the title because she forgot Nemo's name again.
The few times where Dory is mistaken for dead, are actually a reference to regal blue tangs, Dory’s species, and their tendency to 'play dead' to try and dissuade predators.
The Central Theme of overprotectiveness doing more harm than good not only applies to Marlin in the main story, but Coral in the prologue as well. The Barracuda didn't notice the eggs (it only focused on Marlin and Coral) before Coral suddenly darted down to protect them, which ended up leading it straight to them and getting both them and her eaten, just as Marlin's constant smothering of Nemo eventually led to the latter becoming irritated with him and getting kidnapped. In a way, this makes Marlin's overprotectiveness even more tragic, as he's ultimately repeating the same mistakes his late wife did.
The climax near the end of the movie is essentially a Book End for the opening scene - hundreds of lives (including the most prominent female in Marlin's life) in danger of being eaten by a predator: the eggs, Coral and the barracuda in the opening and the fish in the net, Dory and the fishermen in the climax. The main difference is that while Coral was unable to let go of her overprotectiveness and tried to save the eggs, directly leading to her and most of them getting eaten by the barracuda, Marlin managed to let go of his own overprotectiveness in order to let Nemo into the net, in turn saving Dory and the fish from the fishermen.
Why is Marlin so overprotective of Nemo? Because clownfish are aggressively territorial!
Nemo is a Latin word that means "nobody". And it makes sense that this is his name because he's one little fish out of millions in the Pacific Ocean. But it ends up being an Ironic Name because to Marlin, Nemo is his entire world.
This article by Cracked about clownfish's mating habits... yeah...
Seeing as the clownfish (and all the other sea creatures) can communicate in English, blink, and have human emotions, it is safe to conclude that the story takes place in an Alternate Universe, in which the mating habits of the clownfish hew closely to those of humans.
Also, a father clownfish that becomes female would be displaced by a rival or eaten by something long before any of his/her offspring grew big enough to mate, and the juveniles disperse to their own anemones anyway.
The very fact that Marlin and Coral expected half their eggs to hatch out girls would definitely support the notion that these particular clownfish don't demonstrate the same Gender Bender physiology as real-world clownfishes.
The other fish from the dentist's office manage to get out to the ocean, too...inside plastic bags. No one else knows they're out there, and the oxygen in those bags isn't going to last forever. Even if it did, there's no food in the bags. The fish themselves aren't strong enough to break the bags - even the shrimp's pincers would have a hard time getting a grip from the inside; the only thing that's getting them out is a bigger fish...who is presumably interested in eating them. Either way - suffocation, starvation, or predation - the other fish are likely dead (and let's not even go into how a pet shop fish is going to survive in the wild if they somehow did manage to break free).
The horror is diminished, however, as they show up during the end credits.
They also reassure each other by saying "it's only an outtake".
Pufferfish have jaws strong enough to chew their way out of a shark's stomach. Bloat just has to get free first, then they'll be fine.
Even if the fish do escape, those plastic bags are going to be left drifting in the ocean for years. Quite possibly long enough to kill Crush or one of his buddies, as sea turtles often mistake floating baggies for jellyfish, eat them, and choke to death or block up their digestive tracts.
It's scary enough seeing a lifeless Dory in the tentacles of the jellyfish, but then you figure that if Marlin hadn't gotten to her sooner, she would have likely been consumed.
After Marlin witnesses a supposedly dead Nemo, he's depressed and leaves Dory near the reef. When Dory finds Nemo and remembers his identity she learns from a crab that Marlin went to "The Fishing Ground". Given that the crab specifically calls it that, if Marlin knew what it was called it was likely he was going there specifically to commit suicide.
Certainly creepy to think about, but how would Marlin have known that?
And actually, this is disproved in the movie itself: as Marlin is swimming through the Fishing Ground, he bumps into another fish and says that he's "just trying to get home". Would Marlin have cared if he'd been scooped up before discovering Nemo was alive? Probably not. But he didn't go there specifically to commit suicide.
More of a Fridge Tear Jerker, but it's pretty awful when you realize that if Coral had just gone back inside the anemone like Marlin told her to, she and the eggs would likely have been fine, seeing as it was her swimming towards them that got the barracuda's attention. (And, as has been pointed out elsewhere, barracudas don't even eat eggs, normally. It probably would have left them alone.)
Another Fridge Tear Jerker: Marlin's terror at Nemo going to the drop off seems like fatherly overprotectiveness, until you remember that the drop off is where he lost his entire family except for Nemo.
Unless he shows up in the sequel, we never see if Nigel finds out that Nemo was playing dead. He might end up living the rest of his life thinking he failed Nemo and Marlin
Sadly, he wasn't in Finding Dory.
However, considering how far Marlin's story spread across the seas, and that Nigel is friends with the tank gang, who know Nemo is alive, it's pretty much a given that Nigel would have eventually heard about their reunion and return. Hopefully, a third film will be made that confirms this.
When the duo meets Bruce, Dory just swims up to him and says hi. To a giant white shark! She's even willing to join him for a "party". She's lucky he was friendly, and given her personality, one may wonder how she survived that long.
Maybe she just had good intuition and could actually tell he was friendly. Chances are though that she just has never met a shark. Or maybe doesn't remember meeting any others.
Adult great whites generally don't go after prey as small as clownfish or blue tangs. And since Dory's quite knowledgable about the ocean despite her memory problems, she would presumably know that.
Fish being sapient beings in this universe makes overfishing and manmade destruction of the aquatic ecosystem somehow even worse. We aren't just killing animals necessary for the functioning of the natural world, we're exterminating races of people.
by Cracked about clownfish's mating habits... yeah...