With Nemo’s home set in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the Pixar team hadone of the most colorful environments on Earth to workwith. The unlikely challenge was how much to change its otherworldly beauty.

Early R&D tests were startling. “It looked so real!” recalls John Lasseter. “From that first CG coral reef test we realized we had to go further with stylization than we’d ever gone before. Of course we have talking fish, but we really needed the audience to know that this world, while believable, was also make-believe.”