Hacker Cinema
Finding Dory
2016 · Film · 97 min
Part of Finding Nemo Collection
Directed by Andrew Stanton
Dory is reunited with her friends Nemo and Marlin in the search for answers about her past. What can she remember? Who are her parents? And where did she learn to speak Whale?
5 positive6 negative16 neutralfrom 27 commenters
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28 comments on Hacker News
I wholeheartedly disagree. Pixar does not have a monopoly on attention to detail. They're flush with cash and their leadership has decent taste.
There are so many creators putting in intense work, and doing it on low budgets. You can't claim these folks don't have attention to detail. Check out A24, low and mid and low budget films, or independent films and you'll see a wide assortment of highly meticulous storytellers.
Pixar, on the other hand, isn't low or mid budget:
Toy Story - $30 Million A Bug’s Life - $120 Million Toy Story 2 - $90 Million Monsters, Inc. - $115 Million Finding Nemo - $94 Million The Incredibles - $92 Million Cars - $120 Million Ratatouille - $150 Million WALL-E - $180 Million Up - $175 Million Toy Story 3 - $200 Million Cars 2 - $200 Million Brave - $185 Million Monsters University - $200 Million Inside Out - $175 Million The Good Dinosaur - $200 Million Finding Dory - $200 Million Cars 3 - $175 Million Coco - $175 Million Incredibles 2 - $200 Million Toy Story 4 - $200 Million Onward - $175 Million Soul - $150 Million Luca - Unknown but probably around $150 Million Turning Red - $175 Million Lightyear - $200 Million For that amount of money, they had better pay attention to detail.
Miyazaki is doing way more with much less.
Voices of a Distant Star was one person -- Shinkai. That's the kind of thing we'll see more and more of. Small creators reaching audiences and building studios. Gooseworx, psychicpebbles, Vivienne Medrano. That's the algorithm of tomorrow.
AI, as a tool, makes this more possible. One of the first people to do it successfully was Joel Haver, and he's just the first of many to come.
There have only been a few Pixar movies I haven’t liked Cars 2, The Good Dinosaur and Finding Dory and not all of the others have had drawn an emotional response from me. That said anything that draws you in and makes you feel something is by definition good art. Art is completely subjective. This blog post is just another “I don’t like other people having fun” post
It used to be that Pixar films regularly got past $1B in revenue.
Most Pixar films don't actually get anywhere close to $1 billion; they tend to reach the $500-600m range worldwide. Only a handful of Pixar's films have breached the $1b threshold: Finding Dory, Toy Story 3 and 4, and Incredibles 2.
Turning Red earned $20m in countries like Poland, the UAE, and Vietnam...i.e., tiny markets, and only for 2 weeks, due to COVID. It was not released theatrically in major markets, but based on comparables to pre-COVID releases, if it had been released theatrically in major markets, it would be looking at over $600m in box office revenue, and online viewership numbers suggest it might have made close to a billion at the box office.
Soul, likewise, was primarily a Disney+ release (it wasn't released theatrically in the U.S.), and $120m in box office gross for a 2020 release is...amazing...considering that 99% of theaters were closed that year.
Onward was released right before the Spring 2022 COVID outbreak, and would have done much better if theaters hadn't closed 2 weeks after it released (though probably not much more than $4xx million worldwide based on tracking, so still underperforming but not a flop).
Lightyear was objectively bad. The story was too convoluted for children, too simplistic for adults, the characters were generic and forgettable, and nothing in the movie suggested it had anything to do with Buzz Lightyear as it was presented in Toy Story except for the name "Lightyear." Preview audiences were so confused about the movie's relationship to Toy Story that Disney had to add a blurb at the beginning claiming that this was Andy's favorite movie (but in the original Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear was an animated show with a movie, a la South Park, not a standalone movie). Lightyear should have been planned, produced, and released as a Disney+ film.
including two of the executives behind “Lightyear”: director Angus MacLane and producer Galyn Susman. MacLane had been at Pixar for more than two decades, serving as an animator on classics like “Toy Story 2,” “The Incredibles” and “Finding Nemo.” He co-directed the 2016 sequel “Finding Dory” before his first solo directorial feature film “Lightyear.” The spinoff of the “Toy Story” franchise, which featured Chris Evans as the voice of Buzz Lightyear, was a commercial dud; Deadline estimated the film lost the studio more than $100 million.
Susman, likewise, was a longtime Pixar employee. She is also the hero of one of the company’s most legendary stories. During the making of “Toy Story 2,” a Pixar employee accidentally wiped the servers of nearly the whole movie. Thankfully for the animators, Susman was working from home while taking care of her newborn child — her backup copy saved the film.
Having done great work in the past is not enough to incentivize others to keep you around.
Almost all of their best movies have had heavy involvement in the writing / directing role by a couple of key players and most of those individuals have either graduated to a producer role or have moved on from Pixar.
Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Up, Inside Out, and Soul were all written and/or Directed by Pete Doctor.
Finding Nemo, Finding Dory, and Wall-E were written and directed by Andrew Stanton.
There are multiple writing and directing credits on all of their films, but these two have writing and directing credits on almost all of the great original ones.
One thing I have noticed is some of the more recent Pixar movies don't feel like Pixar movies at all. They feel like Disney movies: Lot's of musical numbers, a lot more slap stick and silly, more cheap laughs. Have to wonder if Disney has been asserting too much influence on the company.
Animated movies that I often rewatch (in no particular order):
- Spirited Away
- Grave of the Fireflies
- Finding Dory
- Up
- Tokyo Godfathers
- Akira (NOT the English dub, which completely changes the story and dialogue for the worse, and for no good reason)
- Mononoke Hime
- Ghost in the Shell (the original one)
- My Neighbor Totoro
Animated series I'll rewatch:
- Guardian of the Sacred Spirit
- Castlevania
- Futurama
- Archer
- Arcane
- Cowboy Bebop
- Ergo Proxy
- The Dragon Prince
- Hakaba Kitaro
- Star Trek: Lower Decks
Inside out was good, but not great, IMO.
Counter-counterpoints:
Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University, The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, Cars 3, Coco, Onward, Luca, Turning Red, Lightyear.
The (not very original) point is: You can no longer count on a Pixar movie being excellent.
Finding Nemo was so far ahead of its time in terms of beauty of the animated undersea world and just the incredibly vivid colors that pervade that whole movie. Its extremely surprising that it was filmed in 2003(almost 20 years ago) and comparing it to finding dory it still looks better than its sequel.
10 years is a lot of time, and "worth saving" is a very low barrier.
I'd classify Kubo And The Two Strings, and Inside Out as must-watch films. Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse set new boundaries for what's possible with animation.
Moana, Zootopia, Big Hero 6, Wreck-it Ralph, The Incredibles 2 and Finding Dory are all pretty good films, and definitely tick all the boxes you listed.
I'm not even looking at Anomalisa, Isle of Dogs, and other such more adult-oriented animated films.
Most of the Disney movies where they use animals have decently mature parallel plots. Finding Nemo and Finding Dory are basically about coping with disability. Lion King is basically Hamlet. Etc.
The original study can be found here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-019-01233-7
Abstract:
> Representations of wildlife in television and films have long been hypothesized to shape human-wildlife interactions. A recent example is Pixar’s film Finding Dory, which featured a blue tang fish (Paracanthurus hepatus) as the main character and was widely reported in the popular press to have increased the number of such fish in the pet trade. We use Bayesian posterior predictive counterfactual models to evaluate the movie’s effect on three metrics of societal behaviour. Although there was an increase in global online searches for the blue tang 2–3 weeks after the movie, we find no substantial evidence for an increase in imports of blue tang fish into the US, or in number of visitors to US aquaria compared to counterfactual expectations. It is vital that an evidence-based discourse is used when communicating potential impacts of popular culture on human-wildlife relationships to avoid loss of credibility and misdirection of conservation resources.
Where do Disney's TV channels fit into this? Besides the obvious Disney Channel, Disney XD, and Disney Junior, they also own the FX channels and Freeform.
Their movies currently eventually make it to those, and that is mostly where I've watched them. Sure, they take some time to get there. They are currently just up to 2016, with Moana, Finding Dory, Rogue One, and Doctor Strange being where they are up to in Disney animation, Pixar animation, Star Wars, and Marvel, respectively. But none of their franchises are ones that I need to keep current with anymore [1], so I don't mind.
[1] I did subscribe to Netflix for a month a few months ago specifically to get up to date on Marvel, so I could see Endgame in theaters. That was a special case because I decided it would be too hard to avoid major spoilers in the two or three years it would take to show up on cable.
Its way more complicated than that.
In the old days, artists would change the scenes to match the technology. If human skin couldn't be rendered well, you just showed off plastic and metals. Or, they'd make a "cartoony style" and hope that the audience would get used to the plastic barbie-looking skin.
Or in the case of Toy Story: you just make a story revolve around plastic toys. Plastic looks good, remember, in 90s CGI. As long as actually humans are rare, the movie will look "realistic".
But you can't just keep making movies about Toys with plastic-like skin. And improving the algorithms to have realistic skin requires harder calculations such as "subsurface scattering".
Today, artists want to show off more materials, and they also want all those materials to be more believable. Pixar is insane with their details: they spent two years on creating the "Hank the Octopus" in "Finding Dory". And it shows: good reflections off the skin highlight the wetness of the Octopus, Hank walks and moves very much like a real octopus, etc. etc.
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In short: there are some materials which don't require much processor time. You probably can get away with a toy-story like plastic look and feel with 10 samples per pixel (talking 90s era here, where things were still relatively flat and primitive).
But if you want to create a CGI Grand Moff Tarkin in an otherwise live-action movie (Star Wars: Rogue One)... you'll need to do better than that. These scenes will naturally require 100s or 10,000 even samples before the human eye is tricked.
> Brilliant! Except, erm, which one of the top 50 grossing films is telling somebody's story?
I don't believe it. I googled for fun and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films#Highest-grossing_films only Titanic and Finding Dory qualifies :|.
People forget that Disney owns a lot of must-see content:
For example, here is the list of top grossing movies of 2016 http://www.imdb.com/list/ls074920894/
Disney had the following films
1. Captain America: Civil War
2. Rogue One
3. Finding Dory
4. Zootopia
5. The Jungle Book
11. Doctor Strange
12. Moana
19. Alice Through the Looking Glass
For 2017 so far (http://www.the-numbers.com/box-office-records/domestic/all-movies/cumulative/released-in-2017)
Disney has
1. Beauty and the Beast
3. Guardians of the Galaxy V2
11. Pirates of the Caribbean
13. Cars 3
They own the Marvel franchise, the Star Wars, as well as some of the most loved children's movies in history. They also have a ton of children's TV programs.
If Disney really had a subscription service with all their movies and TV shows, I would choose them over Netflix.
i wouldn't be able to tell that the chair in the first few seconds of this isn't real: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nKb9hRYbPA
on the blue ray dvd of pixar's finding dory, closely examine the sand and water (ignore the living creatures) in the first few minutes of the short film piper. you know a-priori it's not real, but i'd like to hear people describe what they think looks off with the environments (not the creatures). try to normalize that with the intent of a director trying to craft an identical ambiance from a recorded video (color temperatures may be made warmer in post, increased saturation, more vignetting, etc).
in big hollywood vfx house showreels, there's a lot that's obviously cg (again, we're still off on creatures), but what about the environments within? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnfdpgDDLc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SabPuZ5coKk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_i0XuA9KLEo
in particular, i don't think people watching that night-time sequence of deepwater horizon in theaters would identify it as entirely computer generated.
I miss the old Pixar. Yes, now Disney is making better animated films, but I'm not sure it's worth the loss of truly great Pixar films. Plus, it seems that Disney is slipping too. Though they released some good films after the acquisition of Pixar (Tangled was excellent), their recent releases have been... mediocre. I never liked Cars, Finding Dory could've been better... I suppose Moana was pretty good, but the exception to the new rule. Now to see good, emotionally resonant films, we look to other studios. Kubo was astounding good, for example. Props to Lassiter for his success, but it comes at the cost of great films for the whole family.
The proposal: "Premium video rental", at $30 - $50. Right. When VHS first came out, the movie industry thought that a video rental should cost about as much as a theater show for a family of 4, including popcorn. That didn't work, although the reason was the First Sale Doctrine, which allowed video rental without payments to studios and forced prices down. That doesn't apply online, and all the players are now huge near-monopolies. They can push prices up, but can't make people watch.
3D was supposed to save theaters. It didn't. (Incidentally, while "Ghost in the Shell" is reasonably good, don't see it in 3D. The director likes blurry backgrounds. 3D has negative value for blurry backgrounds.)
Lack of originality remains a big problem. "Four of the top 10 highest grossing films last year were based on Marvel or DC Comics characters." In theaters now, the Lego Batman movie. There are currently 69 more comic book movies in the pipeline.[1] Even the duds, such as Ant-Man, are getting sequels. Variety says consumers may be getting tired of comic book movies.
Some original ideas do make big money. Last year, "The Secret Life of Pets" — $875.4 million, "Zootopia" — $1.023 billion, "Finding Dory" — $1.027 billion, were in the top 10. They're all animated. Not one of the top 10 highest grossing movies of 2016 was a live-action non-sequel/remake. Maybe originality now requires a longer format than the one-off film. Consider Game of Thrones.
Meanwhile, I'm watching Korean drama and Japanese anime.
[1] http://www.denofgeek.com/uk/movies/comic-book-adaptations/32829/69-upcoming-comic-book-movies-and-when-to-expect-them
My point was that they would not have been impossible without CGI. All four of those movies could have been made prior to the mid-80s, with different technology. I chose Rogue One and Jungle Book because one comes from a family of movies that excelled in practical effects, optical compositing, and modeling and the other has a version which was made in the 1940s.
Decades ago, Finding Dory would have been hand animated (though, even that had moved begun moving to computers in the late 80s). I haven't seen Captain America, but I would guess similar types of movies existed before hand (the 80s and early 90s are full of over the top action movies and practical effects; some of which still hold up today).
Visual story telling doesn't require CGI. It might be the most pragmatic way to do things now (due to time, cost, complexity, etc.), but it's not the _only_ way.
A pretty small percentage, obviously. The top grossing movies of 2016 were Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Finding Dory, Captain America: Civil War, The Secret Life of Pets, and The Jungle Book. All of these movies would be impossible to do without CGI.
Viewers want movies to be spectacles. If we're watching something in a theater, we have high expectations of the production value. Otherwise, why even waste the time and money going to a theater? We can watch the "good", low production value movies at home.
Consider 8 had a $306,000,000 budget, 9 had a $200,000,000 budget. I have no problem saying it was profitable, but so was The Land Before Time 9. When a movie pulls in ~1/2 has much as the previous film it's a sign.
http://www.the-numbers.com/market/2016/top-grossing-movies
Just looking domestically we have Finding Dory (squeal), Rogue One (franchise), Captain America: Civil War (squeal), The Secret Life of Pets (kids movie), The Jungle Book (kids movie), Deadpool (franchise), Zootopia (kids movie), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (franchise), Suicide Squad (franchise), Doctor Strange (franchise), Moana (kids movie) etc. Down at #14 The Revenant was at least nominally an original movie, though very similar to several other films.
I don't think any of these where bad for what they where, but there was nothing new for the 14-40 group. 2015 had #6 American Sniper, #9 The Martian, but was again mostly rehashed movies until #17.
Gravity was spectacular in 3D, but I have a much larger list of films (many of which aren't great) that have immersive and not distracting 3D. Off the top of my head:
Life of Pi
Pretty much every Marvel movie
The new Star Trek films
Star Wars: Episode VII
The Martian
The Hobbit films
How to Train Your Dragon and sequel
Finding Dory
The LEGO Movie
> Today's dominant storytelling technique, in contrast, nearly always portrays one or two individuals in dire scenarios, without useful support from the societies that made them.
I dunno, that last movie I saw in theaters, Finding Dory, was sort of about the social support system coming out to save a member of society in some deep shit...
For those that didn't see Finding Dory in theatres, this is the short that ran before the movie.
we saw finding dory yesterday with my son (3.5). it was his first ever movie theater experience. after 30 minutes of previews of other cg animated films, when Piper played it was almost like hearing the folks at Pixar say, oh nice guys. and here's a little something we put together. amazing. my wife said it was one of the best short films she's seen; I dally in 3D (Blender with Cycles is absurdly fun), so understood the technical prowess behind such this lovely film.
and my son was silently enraptured.
Watched "Piper" before "Finding Dory" the other day. We liked it better than the feature film.
It's both. Each new movie will generate new technical challenges, and the tech side of the studio will be prompted to rise to the new creative demands. Finding Dory, for example, is a natural choice for using path tracing because of all the refractive surfaces-- In a movie that's set in the ocean, it's pretty important to have water that looks realistic and natural (and frankly, using older technology might be more difficult to work with in the end). Finding Nemo-era technology would not really cut it these days. It makes sense that Pixar should put in a lot of effort to get this right.
On top of that, it's important to stay on the cutting edge, both in terms of keeping RenderMan a competitive product, and in terms of keeping the internal challenges interesting and fresh-- which is necessary for attracting top talent and preventing the company from getting into a rut or a routine.
Pixar movies from Finding Dory onward will be exclusively raytracing, FWIW.