It looks like Finding Dory now has a co-director: Angus MacLane.
Director Andrew Stanton himself, who also directed the first film and WALL-E, confirmed this on Twitter recently…
From my co-director’s clever Lego “couch” series: “@AngusMacLane: Tony Stark having a drink on a couch, in LEGO. http://t.co/uw6oyALe36”
— andrew stanton (@andrewstanton) June 5, 2014
Pixar has little by little been letting people outside of the Lasseter-Docter-Stanton-Bird circle helm films. We saw Lee Unkrich completely handle Toy Story 3 and he has another film (based on the Day of the Dead holiday) in the works, Brad Lewis was given a shot with Cars 2 only to get replaced at the eleventh hour by John Lasseter when the project ran into problems. The same thing happened to Brave, which was originally set to be directed by Brenda Chapman but she was then replaced by Mark Andrews, also a first-time director at Pixar. Dan Scanlon directed Monsters University, and before he was removed, Bob Peterson was set to direct 2015’s The Good Dinosaur. Teddy Newton and Mark Andrews are directing currently untitled projects.
It’s quite interesting to see MacLane get the co-director gig. MacLane first directed the WALL-E short BURN-E, and then helmed the Toy Story toon Small Fry. After that, he got to direct the well-received Toy Story of TERROR! special that aired last autumn. Of TERROR! was a roughly half-hour entry in the Toy Story franchise that showed that Pixar could tell a good story in that amount of time, MacLane is a very solid choice for a co-director on this film. Maybe this indicates that he’ll eventually direct his own film at Pixar after Finding Dory is completed.
