WMG / Finding Nemo

Plot

The Tank Gang gets out of their bags, only to die of ocean-born pathogens.

Gurgle could've seen it coming: With their environment filtered and closely monitored, they would have no real immunity to germs and parasites also living in the ocean.

• Or, rather, everyone except Gill will die, because he is the only one who was born in the ocean and managed to gain immunity before he was caught. That calls for an angsty fanfiction.
  • Please post a link to that fanfiction once it's up. That'll be some good reading.
    • Might be a little late, but here it is.
• Jossed by the sequel; The Stinger shows the Tank Gang still in their bags, and being rescued by the MLI

Nigel eventually finds and rescues the Tank Gang.

His beak should be strong enough to tear through the bags, and they ARE seen in the credits, swimming freely in the ocean.

• Jossed by the sequel; They're shown arriving at the same aquarium most of the movie took place in during The Stinger

Coral (Nemo's Mom) is still alive, but she suffered Laser-Guided Amnesia (the classic kind, not the kind Dory has)

There was no blood in the water after the Baracuda-scene.

• Maybe because a Baracuda is large enough to swallow a clownfish on the whole.

The barracuda didn't eat the eggs.

• They prefer live prey. After knocking out Marlin, it ate Coral in one bite and left. Other reef fish moved in to scavenge the eggs, and in the hubbub, one egg was knocked away - the one that became Nemo.

The barracuda had become separated from its school.

• To explain why a lone barracuda went after clown-fish and the eggs, the barracuda had for whatever reason gotten separated from the rest of its group and was now trying to survive best it could alone. The reason it attacked Marlin's nest was simply cause it was desperate for a meal.

Large parts of the film never happened.

'Nemo' means no-one. Maybe Nemo doesn't exist.

• Then why does Marlin leave his anemone?
  • Delusional. Duh.
    • Alternatively, Nemo was killed in the beginning along with Marlin's wife. Marlin fell into a psychosis, and the entire adventure is purely imagined.
    • So would Dory be his subconscious trying to let him know everything but her (or at least her amnesia) was an illusion?
    • This just makes the film incredibly sad...
• Then what about the Tank Gang, the Dentist, Darla, and Nigel the Pelican?

Nigel will find out about Nemo being alive from the Tank Gang.

• Considering his friendship with them and the fact that they all know he faked his death, this is pretty much a guarantee. And considering how fast word spread about Marlin's journey to find Nemo, it's quite likely that word will also get out that Marlin and Nemo were reunited, so both Nigel and the Tank Gang will know.

Characters

Dory spent some time in an aquarium.

As Gill points out, and as Nemo's time in the tank shows, fish in aquariums tend to go insane. Dory lived in an aquarium, probably a large one, and that is how she learned to read.

It was a large public aquarium, and they had dolphins or small whales; that is how she knows how to speak whale. They also had sharks (what large aquarium wouldn't?), and so she doesn't have the instinctive fear of sharks that normal fish have.

Naturally, she doesn't remember because her time in the aquarium damaged her memory. She especially doesn't remember ever being in the aquarium.

"Short-term memory loss. Mm-hmm, it runs in my family. At least, I think it does... where are they?"

This would also explain how she understand how to read English. She must have spent some time with humans to be able to read.

• Confirmed! In fact, she was raised in one.

Bubbles is doomed the first time he encounters a little blue penguin.

Penguins leave streams of bubbles to confuse predators, but if it attracts dinner...

Nemo's Mom is his Dad.

The dominant fish in any clownfish shoal becomes female, all others stay male. Nemo's Dad is the only adult clownfish in the locale, therefore he should be a she.

• So "she" should be called Marlina?

Dory is actually Coral, Marlin's Wife

Coral never actually died, she just was severely injured from the barricuda attack. She stop breathing for a little bit, causing brain damage (erasing her memory and making her inable to encode new memories) and causing her skin to turn permanently turn blue. She was found by a family of blue tangs and they helped nurse her back to health. When she sees Marlin, she still can't really remember her old life with him because of the trauma from the attack, but she does still unconsciously feel a connection between them.

• What about decidely non-clownfish features like the bigger size and the shape of the fins?
• Plastic surgery. It's all the rage right now in the ocean.
• Alternately: reincarnation?
  • Or, Time Lord Regeneration??? (What? Someone had to say it.)

Nemo is a runaway teenager who got hit by a car

Finding Nemo is his Dying Dream.

Marlin was tank-bred.

He's fearful of the outside world. He doesn't understand the way the ocean works, besides sharks and everything bigger than him eating fish. That's just instinct, and instinct is impossible to breed away.

• Actually, it was the loss of his wife and eggs that made him so paranoid. In the beginning, he seemed really excited about his kids getting to see the ocean ("They'll wake up, poke their little heads out, and they'll see a WHALE! Right by their bedroom window"). The reason he's so protective of Nemo is because he was the only egg that survived the attack, and Marlin doesn't want any more close calls.

Dory is a human turned into a fish

How else would she know about balloons, evolution, root beer floats, the relativity equation, haircuts, piñatas, and cake?^note The latter four are mentioned when she talks in her sleep in the outtakes of the DVD.

• The first WMG listed in this folder suggested that Dory may have been in a tank before and therefore had previous contact with humans. This would also explain it.

The whale was trying to help Marlin and Dory get to Sydney.

The whale heard about Marlin's story while it was being spread around the ocean, so, after searching for some krill to eat, saw the two fish and recognized them. After catching them in his mouth, he carried them over to Sydney and released them there. ^note This is by no means a new theory or rumor. It has been around ever since the film came out in 2003.

One of the reformed sharks killed Marlin's family.

Hey, who knows what they got up to before we see them?

• The fish that killed Marlin's family was a barracuda, not a shark.
• However, as mentioned above, it's possible that the barracuda didn't eat the eggs.

Darla is Boo

She ended up crazy after spending time with the monsters.

Darla is mentally handicapped

This is one that my friends and I talked about. It's the only reason we can think of for why an 8-year-old girl would talk like she's fresh out of pre-school and why her uncle (and her parents) wouldn't have bothered to explain why shaking a fish the way she was shaking Nemo (and presumably Chuckles, her present from the year before) is harmful to it. Well, that and her uncle is clearly a few notes short of a song.

Chuckles faked his death.

Just as Nemo faked his own death, who's to say Chuckles didn't do the same thing. The Pixar-Pedia released in 2009 actually supports this theory, believe it or not.

"P.Sherman" isn't actually the dentist's name.

It's assumed that the dentist's name is "P.Sherman" because it's is the name on the mask. But it's possible that the dentist wasn't the one who captured Nemo, or even one of the divers at all. Sure, he claims to a patient to have been the one to have "saved" Nemo, but that itself isn't true.

Deb really did have a sister named Flo.

Possibly her twin sister. But Flo apparently went to a separate owner. Deb obviously doesn't realize this since she saw her reflection and thinks that it is Flo.

Sandy Plankton was the barracuda.

In the beginning of the movie, nearly everyone in the reef goes into hiding once that barracuda showed up. Later on, some of Nemo’s classmates seem to talk about this ‘Sandy Plankton’ character. It could be possible that Sandy Plankton was the name of the barracuda, and the kids could’ve heard about Sandy from their parents.

Crush and Squirt aren't blood-related.

Given how Sea Turtles are hatched, and the sheer unlikeliness for a surviving Sea Turtle baby to ever encounter its parents again, it's more likely that Crush found the young Squirt shortly after he ended up in the ocean, and decided to take him in.

Marlin is a trans male.

The film gets a lot of clownfish facts correct but there is one glaring exception: the fact that clownfish are hermaphrodites who begin life as males then change into females after the female dies. When Coral died, this should’ve made Marlin female. But what if that wasn’t a scientific inaccuracy but a stealth implication that Marlin is transgender? One might argue the process of hermaphroditism is transgenderism in animals but remember that sex and gender are different and gender is more of an identity. Marlin might actually have the sexual characteristics of a female but he identifies as male and since he’s very much implied to be male in the films, it’s safe to assume that his identity is well respected even by those who disrespect him in other regards. One could argue that the movie was made in 2003 so there would be no way society would accept his identity but remember that homosexuality has been reported in most (if not all) animals but homophobia was only reported in humans so assuming it’s accepted in an animal environment isn’t too far fetched.

Alternatively, Coral isn't dead.

She survived the barracuda attack but became separated from her family, hence why Marlin hasn't turned into a female.

Setting

The species of fish and other underwater life evolved from a common ancestor who lived in/around the shores of America.

This is why nearly everyone speaks in American accents.