The LA Times is reporting that after watching ‘Blackfish’, a documentary about the health of whales in captivity, Pixar’s John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton (director of both Finding Nemo and its sequel) met with Gabriela Cowperthwaite, the director of Blackfish, in April after watching the documentary.
Louie Psihoyos, director of the Oscar-winning dolphin slaughter documentary “The Cove”, says that Stanton decided to change the end of his movie after watching the documentary and meeting with Cowperthwaite. According to Psihoyos, the original idea was to end Dory with some of the characters in a marine park, but now these characters will have a choice about staying or not in the park. The reasoning behind this is that Pixar doesn’t want people looking back to their movies in 50 years and finding them offensive, similar to what happened with Disney’s Song of the South.
Pixar denied to comment on these reports and the Blackfish director only confirmed she screened the movie at the animation studio and that people were affected by it. There is no way to know if this is true and the script will undergo so many rewrites from here until 2015. The current story could change completely, but maybe Blackfish will influence the final product.
Finding Dory will be released November 25, 2015.
