Humans respond to facial expressions and have the ability to create and decode anthropomorphic characters as a mean of communication (the smiley face for example). To serve the storytelling function of the characters in "Finding Nemo", the designers modified the position and shape of the eyes and gave the characters flexible lips.
The animators at Pixar were committed to achieve realism in their animations, research played a crucial part: studies were done on various dissected fish and whales, to better understand the anatomy of aquatic creatures, help from underwater life experts was provided and software tools were created for water simulations.
One of the issues that were faced, the realism of the environment made the animated character appear out of context in the test footage, which forced the technical team to recreate the environment so it wouldn't look so photorealistic. This brings to mind, the "Uncanny Valley", which is a hypothesis state (first proposed by Masahiro Mori, 1970) in robotics and was later applied in 3D animations, it states that realism (characters and animations) will be more appealing to viewer but within a certain limit that if exceeded will cause the viewers to reject what is presented.
Also it is important to note that characters function properly if presented in a certain context where every element must be part of a unified design that serve the story otherwise it would seem out of place (Withrow S. 2009) , like placing animated talking fish in a photorealistic environment.
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