Finding Nemo — Easter Eggs & Hidden Details

Pixar's signature hides on the underwater camera used by the scuba diver — the model designation reads A113. It is the number of the first-year character animation classroom at CalArts, where John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter studied, and it has been smuggled into essentially every Pixar feature since Toy Story. The placement is unusually pointed here: the number sits on the piece of equipment that documents the film's inciting abduction.

The delivery truck from Toy Story makes its obligatory appearance out on the street beyond the dentist's window, passing by while Gill lays out the escape plan. Disney's own D23 keeps a running index of where the truck is buried in each film, which is the closest thing this joke has to an official rulebook — it has turned up in nearly every Pixar feature since 1995, with The Incredibles the long-standing exception.

The kid slumped in the dentist's waiting room is holding a comic book starring Mr. Incredible — and The Incredibles would not reach cinemas for another eighteen months. The cover art echoes imagery later used to promote the film, which makes this one of Pixar's cleanest examples of a next-film tease planted in advance. The studio had already done it in reverse: Nemo himself shows up as a toy in Monsters, Inc. two years before his own movie.

Down by the toy chest in the waiting room sits a Buzz Lightyear figure, discarded among the practice's communal toys. It is a small joke with a sharp edge given what the film is about: the toy that spent an entire movie insisting he was not a toy, abandoned on a dentist's carpet, in a film whose villain is a child who destroys things she is given.

Two objects tie the practice back to Monsters, Inc. A mobile hanging in the office mirrors the one over Boo's bed, and among the waiting-room toys is a stuffed Mike Wazowski — the plush version of the toy Boo gives Sulley. Pixar's habit of moving props between films is why these read as more than coincidence: the studio treats its own set dressing as a shared prop warehouse.

Among the tank ornaments is a statue lifted from Knick Knack (1989), the early Pixar short about a snowman trapped in a snow globe trying to reach a Miami souvenir. In the tank it sits under a layer of algae, and there is a blonde sunglassed mermaid on a rock marked Sunny Atlantis nearby — the same joke, aged. Putting a short film about a figurine desperate to escape its glass container inside a tank of fish desperate to escape their glass container is not subtle, and it is not meant to be.

Pixar's mascot lamp — the star of Luxo Jr. (1986), the short that became the studio's logo — turns up among the waiting-room objects, keeping the tally of self-references in a single dentist's practice at roughly one per surface. The Luxo lineage is the studio's oldest running gag, and it is the one they most often plant somewhere you have to actively look for.

The framed qualifications on P. Sherman's wall are gag certificates. Among the accolades are a Toothless Grin Award and a Gums Most Likely to Recede citation — the kind of background text that never gets a camera push and exists purely for whoever pauses. It also does quiet characterisation work: the man about to hand a wild-caught clownfish to Darla is decorated for outcomes no dentist should be proud of.

After the credits, Finding Nemo carries a dedication to Glenn McQueen, a Pixar supervising animator who died of melanoma in October 2002, aged 41, during the film's production. Three years later the studio gave his surname to the lead character of Cars. It is the rare Pixar easter egg that is not a joke at all — and once you know it, Lightning McQueen stops being a pun about speed and becomes a memorial that has been running for two decades.

The central set of the film's second half came from the director's own childhood. Andrew Stanton grew up in Rockport, Massachusetts, and the fish tank in his own dentist's waiting room — and the obvious question of whether the fish in it wanted out — is the seed the whole Tank Gang subplot grew from. It reframes the office scenes: the most reference-dense room in the movie is also the most autobiographical one.