Finding Nemo: The Big Blue... and Beyond!
Finding Nemo: The Big Blue... and Beyond! is a live puppet and musical stage show at Disney's Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. Based on Pixar's 2003 film Finding Nemo and set after the events of Finding Dory (2016), the show is performed in the Theater in the Wild, near DinoLand U.S.A. It opened on June 13, 2022, as a shorter, reimagined successor to Finding Nemo – The Musical, which played in the same theatre from 2007 to 2020. Performers visible on stage operate large puppets alongside dancers, sets and video, retelling how the clownfish Marlin crossed the ocean to find his son, Nemo.
History
The Theater in the Wild previously housed Journey into the Jungle Book and Tarzan Rocks! before it was enclosed and reworked for a Nemo production. Finding Nemo – The Musical began previews on November 5, 2006, and officially opened on January 24, 2007.[1] It was notable as a theme park musical built from a film that was not itself a musical. For the stage version, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez wrote an original score, drawing some lyrics from dialogue in the film. The roughly 40-minute show was performed several times a day and became one of the park's major indoor attractions.
The original musical gave its final performance on March 15, 2020, as Walt Disney World closed for the COVID-19 pandemic. It did not reopen in its original form. Disney first announced a reimagined production in 2021, and the new show, Finding Nemo: The Big Blue... and Beyond!, premiered on June 13, 2022, during the Walt Disney World 50th anniversary celebration.[2] Soft opening performances took place shortly before the official opening.
The revision kept the theatre, the puppetry style and much of the Lopez score, but cut the running time to about 25 minutes, updated the staging with new lighting and a large LED video wall, and gave the story a new framing device suited to the shorter running time.
Show
The new version is set at the Marine Life Institute, the setting introduced in Finding Dory. The Tank Gang — the aquarium fish from the dentist's office in Finding Nemo, among them Gil, Bloat, Peach and Bubbles — are now at the institute and awaiting release into the ocean. While they wait, they act as storytellers and recount Nemo's adventure for the audience, which allows the show to present the film's journey as a story being retold rather than played out in real time.
Within that frame, the familiar episodes follow in compressed form. Marlin, voiced in puppet form by a performer who also gives the character his movement and expression, reluctantly allows Nemo to go to school, loses him to a diver, and sets out across the ocean. He meets the forgetful blue tang Dory, encounters the sharks Bruce, Anchor and Chum, rides the East Australian Current with the sea turtle Crush and his son Squirt, and is reunited with Nemo in Sydney Harbour.
Signature songs from the original musical return, including "In the Big Blue World", "Just Keep Swimming" and "Go with the Flow". Large-scale puppetry remains the visual centre of the production: Crush is a particularly large puppet, the sharks loom over the stage, and schools of fish, jellyfish effects and projected water fill the theatre around the principal characters. Because the performers are intentionally visible, the show plays partly as a demonstration of puppetry in its own right, a quality that distinguished its predecessor and was retained in the 2022 version.