Way back in the nineties, Australian filmmaker Frank Shields developed an animated movie about chatty fish on the Great Barrier Reef.
Featuring the teenage son of fictional adventurer Captain Nemo, it was called Captain Nemo Jr and the Guardians of the Reef.
Inspired by the potential for computer animation shown by the first Toy Story in 1995, the veteran writer-director of five films including Hostage, The Surfer and Fatal Sky populated the movie with a clownfish, blue angelfish, great white shark and other undersea characters drawn by artist Frantz Kantor.
Shields later tried turning the idea into an animated TV series to raise awareness of the threat to the Reef through a charity he co-founded, the Oceanguard Society.
While both projects failed to get off the ground, the society had a promotional video screened on the National Geographic Channel in the US.
Three years later, Pixar's Finding Nemo, featuring a clown fish, blue regal tang and great white shark on the Great Barrier Reef, became a hit.
It took more than $US900 million around the world, won an Oscar for best animated feature and sold more than 40 million DVDs.
Now the sequel Finding Dory has opened to record takings for an animated movie, including $US136 million on its first weekend in North America and $US50 million elsewhere in the world.
While not suggesting the idea for the franchise was stolen, Shields says its success shows a great movie could have been made in Australia rather than Hollywood, launching an animation industry.
"We lost Nemo because we had no vision," he says. "The people that were funding stuff only had to read the box office takings for 3D animations. Toy Story told us it was taking off.
Shield accepts director Andrew Stanton's explanation that he came up with the idea for Finding Nemo visiting an aquarium in a theme park and thinking about the computer-animated possibilities of an undersea world.
The similarities between his planned movie and Pixar's, including the name Nemo, the types of fish and a migration scene, are just co-incidences.
"The guys did a great job," Shields says. "We weren't going to make something as good as that but we would have been players. That's what we missed out on."
Shields is now planning to use the characters, including Coco the clownfish and Angel the angelfish, in a new campaign to save the Reef through the charity.
"In the very early sixties, it was a pristine reef," he says. "Then pollution started with coastal development.
"Now we've got shipping, run-offs from the cane farms, acidification and coral bleaching."
Shield wants the charity to tackle the biggest threat to the Reef - the damage done by the crown-of-thorns starfish - by returning of more of its natural predators to the sea.
With their numbers thinned by over-collecting, the charity plans to raise funds to farm these predators, including an attempt to cultivate the the giant triton snail.
