Adam Summers doesn't own a tele-vision. And he had never seen an animated movie until a chance encounter propelled him into the studios of Pixar, as scientific adviser on the company's film, Finding Nemo. The film tells a stirring tale of the efforts of Marlin, a widowed barrier-reef clown fish, to rescue his only son Nemo who has been 'abducted', and taken to live in a dental surgery's aquarium in Sydney. It was the highest-grossing film of 2003, and is in contention for four Oscars at the Annual Academy Awards on 29 February. In early 2000, Summers was beginning a postdoc in fish biomechanics at the University of California, Berkeley. He rented an apartment owned by a woman who was an art teacher at Pixar. At that time, the studio had justapprovedascriptstarringafish-and the director and animators urgently wanted to know more about their subject matter. Summers' landlady acted as a go-between, and invited him to give a lecture. Summers didn't know quite what to expect when he first stepped in front of director and scriptwriter Andrew Stanton and his team in the luxurious screening rooms of the Pixar studios in Emeryville, California. But the film-makers devoured his words like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Summers told them about fish locomotion, behaviour, physiology and coloration. "It was the most engaged class I've ever taught," he says. "I could only get out two or three sentences before a hand would shoot up-and it was graduate-level stuff."
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