Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers, it's Jan here!
Finding Dory director Andrew Stanton has said there are about 30 to 40 minutes of scenes
that were deleted from the movie.
For example, the Tank Gang was originally going to appear in the main part of the film
and there are also interesting scenes in the trailers that ended up being cut.
So, in this video, I'm going to take a look at some of the fascinating deleted scenes
and rejected concepts that didn't make it into the final film.
Just before I start, I've got a second copy of this really beautiful hardback book "The
Art of Finding Dory" to give away thanks to my friends at Abrams & Chronicle.
It's packed with gorgeous concept art and information about how the movie was made.
For a chance to win, it's very simple, just subscribe and leave a comment about the deleted
scenes on this video.
And of course, there are spoilers ahead, so if you want to avoid those, right here's where
you'll find my non-spoiler review of the movie!
When we see the adult Dory for the first time in the movie, she's talking to herself while
asleep in her coral home.
Still asleep, she seems about to sleep swim out of her home, but she bumps her head and
wakes up.
Well in the very first trailer for Finding Dory, we see an alternate version of this
scene where Dory also says "don't cry mommy" in her sleep and then Nemo wakes up to find
Dory has gone sleep swimming.
This scene which was cut from the final movie was actually one of the first sequences of
the film that went into production and was part of a much longer montage of Dory sleep
swimming which had been storyboarded.
In the storyboarded montage, after Marlin pulls Dory off some coral that she's stuck
on, she swims off still asleep.
As Dory swims, she picks up a piece of kelp which catches and tangles up all the other
fish around her as she swims through the neighbourhood.
In one version, the "fish police" are despatched to try and stop her, with Dory eventually
ending up at the drop-off with all the neighbourhood fish tangled up behind her.
Another version shows Marlin tying himself and Nemo to Dory and getting dragged out of
their home when Dory starts sleep-swimming, and then the kelp line connecting them gets
cut accidentally by a swordfish who happens to swim by.
At first, the beginning to Finding Dory was going to include all of Dory's backstory,
much like the way Marlin's backstory was told at the start of Finding Nemo.
Although this technique worked well in Finding Nemo to make us empathise with Marlin, after
test screenings of Finding Dory at Disney, the filmmakers found that they were telling
too much of Dory's past at the start of the film.
Director Andrew Stanton realised he needed to let the audience experience Dory's backstory
as flashbacks little by little throughout the film.
And the flashbacks were actually also more like memory recalls for Dory, which helped
us as an audience experience her story with her.
You might remember Dory's line from Finding Nemo "I suffer from short-term memory loss.
It runs in my family.
At least, I think it does", which Dory repeats again in this sequel.
Well, the filmmakers initially planned for both of Dory's parents to also suffer from
short-term memory loss in Finding Dory.
In fact, Andrew Stanton and screenwriter Victoria Strouse spent nearly two years developing
the story of Dory's parents with this condition, however, they eventually abandoned it as they
found it was too frustrating to have all of Dory's family talk to each other and then
keep forgetting what they'd said.
In the final film, Dory's memory about her parents and home is triggered after she's
knocked out after getting caught by the undertow while listening to a group of migrating rays
singing about going home as they pass by the corral.
And there were also another couple of scenes about Dory's memories that were deleted.
In the first, Dory and Marlin go to Nemo's Parents' Day at his school to retell the tale
of Finding Nemo.
When they leave, Dory sees a seahorse family hugging each other and she starts to feel
lonely and sad.
In a second deleted scene, Dory spots two blue fish, while playing around the coral,
and chases after them.
After she loses them, she ends up scared and alone until Marlin and Nemo find her.
The first trailer for Finding Dory also featured another alternate scene about how Dory remembered
her family.
That showed Dory suddenly realising she'd remembered something, then immediately getting
confused, and forgetting what she was talking about.
The Tank Gang do make an appearance in Finding Dory's post-credits scene, but they were originally
set to appear in a number of scenes in the main part of the movie.
There was going to be a section where Marlin and Nemo look for Dory in the shipping lanes
after getting separated from her.
That scene would also have shown them escaping from a group of squid by hiding in a shipping
container where they run into the Tank Gang, who are trapped in a water bottle that a ship
had thrown overboard.
After Marlin and Nemo help the Tank Gang out of the shipping container, Jacques and Peach
sneak on to a passing tanker, take out the guards, and then they figure out how to navigate
to the Marine Life Institute on the Californian coast to find Dory.
And there was even an alternate version of this deleted scene where the Tank Gang call
on a shoal of flying fish they're friends with who help them get to California to find
Dory.
It's such a funny moment when we meet Hank in the movie and he starts drinking out of
that coffee jug, but the animators also had a version of Hank where it looks like he was
a bit of a hot sauce addict!
There's some very cool concept art of Hank hiding himself in a hot sauce bottle in a
similar way to when he disguised himself as a plant in his coffee jug in the final movie.
Hank also had what could have been a cool scene cut around the moment where Hank and
Dory are in Destiny's pool trying to figure out how to get to the Open Ocean exhibit.
Because they don't know the way, Hank jumps out of the pool and uses a wet-floor caution
board to disguise himself as he retrieves a map on the ground outside.
He then brings it back for Dory to read.
The comedy duo Destiny and Bailey were originally going to have different and much bigger parts
in the movie.
According to Kaitlin Olson, who voices Destiny, early on in the story's development, Destiny
and Bailey were going to be sisters who were kind of enemies but who would come together
by the end of the movie.
Destiny was also going to be a much more neurotic and hypochondriac character, who screenwriter
Victoria Strouse has described as "constantly on the verge of panic [and] a tremendous joy
to write."
There were also going to be a lot more jokes about Bailey's "obsession with his head size"
and Strouse has said she'd love to do a spin-off movie with the pair.
Although we see Dory swimming with some dolphins at the beginning of the movie, at one point
in the movie's development, there was actually going to be a group of hard-of-hearing dolphins
at the Marine Life Institute.
The idea was that the dolphins were being treated for their hearing injuries there after
having worked with underwater sea-mines.
So, would you like to have seen any of those deleted scenes and concepts in the final movie?
Or is there anything else you'd like to have seen in Finding Dory?
Do let me know what you think in the comments below!
And don't forget to subscribe and leave a comment for your chance to win this gorgeous
hardback book, The Art of Finding Dory!
For bonus ways to enter the giveaway, check out the Gleam link in the video description
below.
If you enjoyed this, you might also like my guide to all the easter eggs and references
in Finding Dory or my video explaining the amazing deleted scenes and concepts from Disney's
Zootopia.
And there's links to both videos, which are in my Pixar and Disney playlists, below!
Thanks for watching and see ya next time!
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!