Whale

Whale
Species	Balaenoptera musculus (Blue whale)
Home	Somewhere between Sydney Harbour and the East Australian Current
Appearances	Finding Nemo

The Whale is a minor character in Finding Nemo.

Finding Nemo

In Finding Nemo, the whale is first seen from a distance before he reveals how large he is. Dory starts speaking whale to try and ask him if he can help them find Nemo, but the whale ends up swimming away. But then slowly (and rather ominously) he swims up behind Marlin and Dory (also scaring some Krill, who tell the two fish to swim away), and swallows Marlin and Dory whole. While Marlin struggles to get out, Dory tries to speak to the whale again. Marlin reluctantly trusts Dory and allows himself to be ejected from the whale's blowhole at the risk of being eaten. Fortunately, they are carried to Australia's Sydney Harbour in the process. The whale moans back to Dory, which she takes as its greeting, and thanks it for helping the duo.

Inside the Whale

In Finding Nemo, after Marlin and Dory are swallowed by the Whale, they end up inside its mouth. Before they escape from the whale via its blowhole, much of the whale's inner workings and mechanisms are seen on screen through Marlin and Dory's eyes, such as its uvula, tongue, baleen, and throat.

• First, there is the whale's baleen, which in real life filters water out of the whale's mouth, trapping the krill inside, is shown in the film being rammed desperately by Marlin as he attempts to escape form the clutches of the whale's mouth.

• Second, there is the whale's gigantic tongue, which in real life pushes water out of the mouth's baleen plates before being used as an aid to swallow krill, is mainly Marlin and Dory's final place of refuge inside the whale in the film, when Marlin believes they will get eaten alive and die if they let go of it.

• And finally, the whale's massive uvula (the grape shaped structure seen dangling in the back of the whale's throat above), which is not a part of a blue whale's mouth in real life, acts in the film as a sort of chandelier-like structure to give the whale's otherwise gaping and vast mouth a touch of decoration and class. It dangles back and forth like a pendulum near the back of the whale's throat as Marlin, Dory, and the water inside the whale's mouth is moved around and swallowed.

Gallery

The Whale behind Marlin and Dory (with his toothbrush-like baleen visible as his mouth opens)

Trivia

• One of Finding Nemo's crew members, head shader Robin Cooper, took photos inside a dead, beached gray whale in order to portray the inside of the whale accurately. In addition, while whales' mouths and blowholes aren't connected, director Andrew Stanton had to "defy reality" in order to move the plot, as the other ways that Marlin and Dory could escape from the whale weren't appetizing.

• Blue whales have black baleen plates and tend to be larger. And while the whale has a uvula hanging above his soft palate, whales don't have uvulas at all. (However, this was an intentional mistake by the filmmakers, as they felt audiences would see that Marlin and Dory were inside the whale's mouth if it had a uvula as "stage dressing.")