Spokane Valley native Michael Stocker helped bring Pixar’s ‘Finding Dory’ to the big screen

In one scene from Pixar’s “Finding Dory,” Dory finds herself in a touch pool looking for her friend Hank, a cranky octopus – technically a “septopus” after losing a tentacle.

As she begins to swim, calling Hank’s name along the way, rays of light dance across the bottom of the touch pool while sea anemones of vibrant pinks and blues draw their tentacles close to their column-shaped bodies. The sand subtly shifts around a bulbous sea cucumber, pink with orange protrusions, as it tries to hide itself under the sand, whispering “Hands!” to Dory as it wiggles.

Before Dory can make sense of the message, the hand of a child visiting the touch pool comes into the frame, grabbing the sea cucumber with a rough squeeze.

Children’s hands are soon entering the pool everywhere Dory looks, displacing the sand and creating bubbles in the water as they poke sea urchins and pull starfish off of rocks, the starfish’s suction cup-like feet making a sound like bubble wrap being popped as, one by one, they are detached from the rocks.

Dory, still looking for Hank, begins dodging hands left and right as if she were a soldier dodging bombs on a battlefield. Dramatic music soundtracks the scene.

Before this scene, and the others in “Finding Dory,” came to be, with light, sound, color and the voices of actors like Ellen DeGeneres (Dory) and Ed O’Neill (Hank), it was a sketch from the 70 to 80 animators who worked on the movie, all of whom were supervised by Spokane Valley native Michael Stocker.

Stocker shared his journey from Spokane Falls Community College art student to Pixar supervising animator and the yearslong process of getting “Finding Dory” to the big screen during the Greater Spokane Valley Chamber of Commerce meeting Friday at Mirabeau Park Hotel and Convention Center.

Growing up, art was just a hobby for Stocker. He didn’t take his first art class, a cartooning class, until he was a sophomore at Central Valley High School.

“I thought it would be an easy, fun thing to try,” he said after his presentation. “Every year after that, it was more and more art classes.”

But even then, animation wasn’t on Stocker’s radar; he studied commercial art at SFCC.

It wasn’t until Stocker, taking a film class at the time, saw a commercial for 1988’s “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” that he realized animation was what he wanted to do.

“That film plugged in for me,” Stocker said during his presentation. “Everything connected.”

Stocker then enrolled in the California Institute of the Arts, which was created after the Walt and Roy Disney-led merger of the Chouinard Art Institute and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music.

He was there for two years before landing an internship at Disney World in Florida. At the time, the studio was part of the park, meaning visitors could walk by and watch the animators as they worked.

It was while working in the “fishbowl” that Stocker earned his first Disney credit as an inbetweener trainee, someone who cleans up drawings once a character is ready to be put on screen, on “The Lion King.”

“It’s a pretty awesome first credit,” Stocker said.

After a brief stint at Turner Pictures working on a movie Stocker told the audience no one saw (1997’s “Cat’s Don’t Dance”), he returned to Disney and added animator credits on movies like “Hercules,” “Tarzan,” “Fantasia 2000” and “The Emperor’s New Groove” to his resume.

His first movie for Pixar Animation Studios was 2004’s “The Incredibles.” In fact, Stocker was responsible for animating the opening scene, in which Mr. Incredible is clipping a microphone to his suit in preparation for an interview.

“I told them ‘I should be working on a hand,’ ” Stocker said. “They just drop you right in.”

From there, Stocker worked on “Cars,” a short called “Mater and the Ghostlight,” “Ratatouille,” “Up,” “Toy Story 3” and “Monsters University.”

He was directing animator on “Toy Story 3” and “Monsters University” and stepped into the role of supervising animator on “Finding Dory.”

Though he didn’t work on “Finding Nemo,” the movie from which “Finding Dory” spins off, the film is close to Stocker’s heart because it’s the first movie his children saw in the theater.

Before they begin animating a film, writers and animators undertake an “endless” amount of research in order to create as accurate and detailed a world as possible.

While working on “Cars,” for example, Stocker and the film team drove race cars at Infineon Raceway. During “Ratatouille,” rats in cages were kept near the animators’ desks so they could see how they moved, and crew members took cooking classes.

For “Finding Dory,” members of the team went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to study everything from how the creatures near the coast of California, where much of “Finding Dory” takes place, differ from the creatures near the coast of Australia, where much of “Finding Nemo” took place, to how an octopus moves.

Stocker even got to hold an octopus, telling the audience how its tentacles latched onto his arms.

It was a special moment for Stocker; the octopus, as it turns out, is his favorite animal.

After briefly mentioning the move from 2-D to 3-D computers brought to animation studios, Stocker showed the audience a chart, a spider web of lines stretching to and from a handful of sections with labels like “Editorial” and “Layout.”

The chart, Stocker explained, represented how each department worked together to make “Finding Dory,” which follows Dory, a regal blue tang with short-term memory loss, as she searches for her parents.

Stocker said it all begins with a story, or the blueprint for all other departments.

The idea for the touch pool scene, for example, came from someone wondering what a touch pool is like from a fish’s point of view.

Based on the suggestion to make it like a war movie, the animators set to work creating a rough series of storyboards, providing the characters’ voices themselves, which the editorial department put together as a story reel.

“We have to give the director a performance,” Stocker said of the story reel. “We are the actors in the studio, and we’re acting through cars, rats, fish, superheroes.”

In the extremely watered down version of the touch pool scene, black-and-white versions of Dory, the sea cucumber and starfish are set against a white background, with arms, a few steps up from stick figure drawings, entering and exiting the screen.

There’s not much life to the story reel, no color, water, sand, light or music, but it’s enough for everyone working on the film, including director Andrew Stanton, to get a sense of what the scene will look like.

“Each department looks at the story reel and breaks down ‘What’s my role?’ ” Stocker said. “Every department is relying on every other department.”

The effects department took on the task of creating the movement of the water, and the simulation department wrote code to help the animators loosen up Hank’s movements.

The lighting department, Stocker said, is the frosting on the cake.

“When they add the lighting, the movie comes to life,” he said. “When we see our scenes lit, we feel like the greatest animators of all time.”

Here, Stocker showed a more developed version of the touch pool scene. It still wasn’t ready for theaters, but it was much closer, with more detail and the color the story reel version lacked.

Though a few characters in “Finding Dory” originally appeared in “Finding Nemo,” because of changes in technology, the animators weren’t able to use any work from the first movie and had to rebuild from the ground, er, ocean floor, up.

“We get nothing for free,” Stocker said, noting that every single detail of a scene, from the main characters to something as small as a wall outlet in the background, has been animated. “You don’t think about it, but everything is made up.”

There are also countless character tests to make sure each character is fully developed. As can be expected, things don’t always work out as planned.

One character, a whale shark named Destiny, for example, was originally written with the problem of wanting to be more whale than shark.

The animators tried to draw a shark swimming like a whale, but they couldn’t get the movement exactly right. Instead, they gave Destiny vision problems, which cause her to frequently bump into the walls of her enclosure.

“What’s great about Pixar is they’ll make it better,” Stocker said. “If we have to throw out scenes and money to make it better, they will.”

The character of Hank proved especially challenging, taking Stocker and the animation team more than two years to perfect.

The organic movement of his tentacles in particular was difficult to animate, Stocker said while showing the audience a video of an octopus slowly moving across an aquarium.

“How do you animate that?” Stocker said. “It’s a mess. It’s a beautiful mess.”

The animation team started building the character in its most basic form, using a thin line with a series of spheres attached to represent a tentacle.

By manipulating each sphere, the team worked to create the seamless movement they saw in the tentacles of the real octopuses they observed during their research trip to Monterey Bay.

They also looked to the character of Kaa, a python that appears in “The Jungle Book,” for inspiration.

“After two, two-and-a-half years, we were able to do a walk,” Stocker said. “A walk usually takes three to four months.”

Other aspects of the character, like where to place his mouth and how to recreate an octopus’s ability to change its coloring and texture to match that of its environment, were also challenging for the animation team and took a series of trial and error to get just right.

Wrapping up his presentation, Stocker highlighted five elements of working at Pixar, most of which could be applicable to many of the businesses represented by the Chamber members.

With “How Bad Is It Broken” displayed on screen, Stocker told the audience that every movie Pixar has ever done has been horrible at some point. It’s just a matter of working together to find the problem and fix it.

Stocker also explained Pixar uses a brain trust made up of directors and animators to pick each movie apart, highlighting the good and the bad.

Similarly, Pixar also holds screenings of its movies for children, teens and adults. For “Finding Dory,” the team held five screenings.

“The squirm factor is key,” Stocker said, referring to screenings for children. “If they sit and watch, we know we’ve got it.”

The fourth element, notes, is a big one for Pixar.

Rather than passing a note from one person to the next until it eventually reaches the director – his experience at other studios – Stocker, or any member of the team, can go straight to the director with feedback.

“I’ve never been to any studio where people cared what I thought,” he said.

The final element, removing walls, was perhaps the most relevant for the businesspeople in the audience, yet, as Stocker noted, was also the hardest thing to do.

Essentially, Pixar works to break down walls between departments as much as possible, which sometimes means physically moving people from different departments closer together.

“Communication and collaboration are key,” Stocker said. “Egos need to be put aside.”

After taking a few questions from the audience (Stocker’s favorite celebrity to work with? Tom Cruise, though meeting Radiohead and U2’s Bono were also memorable moments), the meeting adjourned.

Afterward, Stocker continued chatting with audience members about his career. He enjoys his job as supervising animator, making sure the animation team has everything it needs. And he’s good at it, too, successfully managing dozens of animators and collaborating with people from the departments represented on that spider web-like chart.

But, Stocker admits, there’s nothing like being an animator and bringing a performance to life.

As he cautioned the businesspeople in the audience at the beginning of his presentation, “This is going to be more of an art talk than a business talk. I’m not a businessperson. I’m an artist.”