Trust Diane Keaton when she says that Jenny, the blue tang she voices in Pixar’s animated Finding Dory, looks like the real Diane Keaton — minus her trademark hat.
“It’s all in the mouth. Pixar gets the mouth right of the actual person playing the animated part. It’s part of their genius,” says Keaton. “Besides, in real life, don’t you think of me as a fish? I’m sure you do, a motherly fish.”
Director Andrew Stanton certainly saw the maternal part when casting the fish parents — Charlie (Eugene Levy) and Jenny (Keaton) — of the famed, forgetful Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) in Finding Dory (in theaters June 17).
He allowed himself to start thinking of possible parents when fleshing out Dory in the original 2003 hit Finding Nemo. The parents never appeared in that film, but Stanton daydreamed of Keaton, now 70, and Levy, 69, who had starred as the lovable father in 1999's American Pie.
Stanton circled back for his much-anticipated sequel where Dory remembers glimpses of her childhood and heads to Monterey, Calif., to reunite with her long-lost parents.
The director called Keaton, in her first animated voice role, and Levy to see if they would join an array of new Dory voices — including Ty Burrell as Bailey, a beluga whale, and Kaitlin Olson as a whale shark called Destiny.
“One of the big perks of working on the sequel of a big movie is that everybody returns your phone calls,” says Stanton. “They immediately jumped on board.”
The loving fish parents crucially do not have Dory's memory lapses; Pixar filmmakers decided to keep that issue with the daughter. But Jenny and Charlie did pass on many of Dory’s trademark characteristics.
“Both parents have a certain amount of absentmindedness, there’s a flavor of that,” says Stanton. “There’s a flightiness, almost an Annie Hall la-di-da quality to Diane that you just want to believe was part of Dory’s DNA. And Eugene brings a nerdy, dorky, lovable quality.”
Levy believes his Charlie is a well-meaning parent whose jokes can be pretty terrible.
“Charlie is a good dad who thinks of himself as having a great sense of humor, though it’s probably not the sharpest,” says Levy. “They make for a cute couple, if 'cute' is the appropriate word for a fish couple.”
That doesn’t mean they don’t have relationship issues, especially dealing with a daughter with an inability to remember much of anything.
“We’re an everyday, ordinary couple. We love each other and we drive each other nuts and bicker," says Keaton. “It’s like if (Charlie) doesn’t get off my back, I’m going to wring his neck.”
Keaton had added emotional help to get into her character. Her real-life younger sister is named Dorrie (Hall).
"I would think how I would do anything to save my sister," says Keaton. "Dorrie is already the love of my life. So it wasn’t hard for me to go there."
