Finding Nemo (2003) - 21 mistakes

Continuity: When Nemo first finds himself in the fish tank, the starfish tries to report the dentist's actions but her voice is muffled by the glass pane. She has to pull away to talk. However, when the other fish watch the dentist, the starfish is talking perfectly normally and not muffled, even though she's pressed up against the glass again.

Continuity: When the dentist wants to put Nemo in a bag, he has a Ziploc (a plastic bag with a zipper) but when he finally catches him, it has changed to a normal plastic bag.

Continuity: Before Nemo is initiated into the Tank Gang, Brother Bloat introduces the Ring of Fire. Bloat then retreats and goes between the on-looking fish. In the next shot Bloat is on the outside/right. In the following shot Bloat is again in the middle.

Continuity: As the fishing net is being pulled up, a fisherman is shown to the left of two wires on the boat leaning on his elbow. Then in the very next shot, the fisherman is in between the two wires, and now he is leaning on his hand.

Continuity: Towards the middle of the movie, we see a shot with Nemo staring out of the tank, depressed. The camera slowly pans toward the side of the tank and Nemo is reflected in the glass twice. However, towards the end of the movie when Nemo is playing dead, all the fish swim to the other side of the tank and Bloat says something like, "What's happening? Why is he playing dead?" The camera pans to the side of the tank again, but the fish are only reflected once this time. They should have been reflected twice.

Continuity: At the beginning of the film, Marlin sees that only one egg is left and he turns it over in his fins. In the other shots his fins are nowhere near long enough to do this.

Factual error: All the sharks in the movie have three rows of teeth each, and the teeth are all pretty much the same size. In reality, the teeth in each row would be smaller the further they were in the sharks' mouths, since they have not fully grown in yet.

Continuity: After Dory and Marlin passed the jellyfish and Marlin passes out, when the movie returns to the tank, the camera pans over the tank from right to left, and there's a reflection of the Sydney skyline. However, neither walls nor window frames show in this reflection.

Factual error: Throughout the movie, to make it more authentic, small impurities (specks) are seen floating in the water. Throughout most of it, with great attention to detail, the impurities are always seen to be moving with the flow of the water - back and forth. This always works except in the first scene with Marlin and Coral. The sun is shining through the water, and you can see the anemone waving in the water flow, but the impurities are all flowing in one direction, left to right, never changing according to the water movement.

Continuity: The "'For a bite that counts', alligator floss'" poster on the wall, next to the window, disappears as the dentist grabs the pelican, then it suddenly reappears. The poster is first visible in an earlier shot.

Factual error: When Brucie is chasing Marlin and Dory inside the submarine, the chase goes through a few 90 degree turns, but each turn that leads them to chase width-ways inside the submarine is far longer than the actual dimensions of the submarine would allow.

Continuity: In the sequence with the boat, its position changes. When Nemo is looking at it with his friends, it is a long way away. When Nemo gets angry and swims to it, it's suddenly very near the reef. Then, the diver catches him when he's only been swimming away from the boat a few seconds, but the diver has to swim a long way back to the boat. Finally, when Marlin follows the boat, it's very near again, because he gets there before it starts, even though he was temporarily blinded by the camera. The boat does all this without raising the anchor until it leaves.

Deliberate "mistake": Towards the end of the movie fish are seen to swim down in order to submerge the net in which they have been caught. Although the attempt seems logical, it actually needs power against the net to push it down. None of the fish seem to touch the net at the bottom however and if it is the whole mass of fish achieving it, then the bottom fish should have been squashed against the net which (again) isn't the case. 'What brings the net down?' is the question here. (Done deliberately by Disney/Pixar to be visually aesthetically pleasing.)

Plot hole: When Nemo is coming out of the filter after trying to stop it for the first time, it starts to go again. The fish come to help him, and the fake seaweed they put in there doesn't reach. When they show the fish, they still have almost half of it they could put in to save him.

Deliberate "mistake": When Dory is inside the whale, she doesn't have the scars from the jellyfish sting anymore. [This is actually a long-standing Disney tradition. The company seems to believe that it is less traumatic to see violence onscreen if the evidence is gone immediately (blood, scars, etc. always disappear). Still an error, but it wasn't the fault of the CGI animators.]

Continuity: Near the end, when Marlin gets the fishing net off Nemo and talks to him a little about sea turtles, the rocks and seaweed nearby change between shots.

Factual error: After Nigel returns Marlin and Dory to the ocean it is raining and the sky is nearly solid with gray clouds. As Marlin and Dory speak bright sunlight is streaming down through the water all around them, illuminating the ocean floor. Even if the water is extremely shallow where they are swimming the overcast sky would not provide such bright, consistent light.

Continuity: When Marlin and Coral check on the eggs in the nest, when they first look, no eggs can be seen at the mouth of the cave but a couple of shots later the eggs appear.

Deliberate "mistake": Sidney's real harbour skyline is filled with neon signs on top of the buildings. In the movie all them are omitted, presumably due to advertising and aesthetic purposes.

Other: When Nemo swims off to the boat, a diver pops up and catches him, and all the fish react. But this diver should have been visible to Marlin and co. long before it reaches Nemo, as they are far enough from the boat and looking out into open sea, yet none of them reacts until the diver is right behind him. Also, bubbles should have risen into shot before the diver does.

Factual error: Near the end of the movie, when the fish are inside bags and have crossed the street and into the water, you can see the water level in the bags is much higher than the water they are sitting in. In reality, the water level inside the bag would have closely matched that of the surrounding water.