10 Darkly Disturbing Disney Movie Theories

Yep, that’s right. Everybody’s favourite little clownfish never actually existed. Much like Tyler Durden in Fight Club or Lily in Black Swan, Nemo isn’t real but rather a figment of his father’s imagination. According to this depressing theory, at the start of Finding Nemo when a hungry barracuda rocks up to Marlin’s anemone, Nemo is devoured along with his mother Coral and the rest of his siblings.

The grief-stricken Marlin hallucinates the single surviving egg that becomes young Nemo and the rest of the movie depicts the broken-hearted father as he goes through the five stages of grief, from denial (refusing to accept his family’s death) through bargaining (dealing with amnesiac blue tang Dory in order to find his missing ‘son’) to acceptance (letting Nemo go to school).

Need more proof? The Latin meaning of Nemo is ‘no man’ or ‘no one’. The theory is somewhat compromised by Finding Dory, of course, in which a slightly older Nemo makes a reappearance but the sequel could all be a 90-minute-long symbolic representation of Marlin’s relapse into grief… or something like that.