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Making a sequel is supposed to be easy: Get the same folks together, let them do what they did the first time, sit back and rake in the money.

Making a sequel to one of the most beloved animated movies of the past 20 years isn't so simple.

"'Finding Nemo' was my kid's first movie in a theater — there's something about living in that world that everybody loves," said Michael Stocker, a veteran of the Disney and Pixar animation houses and supervising animator on "Finding Dory," which brings audiences back to the undersea world they first experienced in 2003.

Going back wasn't easy, Stocker said, in part because Andrew Stanton — who directed the original — didn't have an idea for a new movie for a long time.

At CinemaCon in April, Stanton told theater owners that he was spurred to revisit the "Nemo" world when Pixar was preparing the 2012 re-release of "Finding Nemo," and he thought about the forgetful Dory. "I started to worry about Dory," Stanton said. "That really bothered me. I couldn't sleep."

The new movie follows Dory (voiced again by Ellen DeGeneres), who has a flash of memory about her long-absent parents. Guided by that memory, Dory swims, along with her clownfish friends Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks) and Nemo (voiced by Hayden Rolence), to a California marine sanctuary.

For an animator, Stocker said on a Salt Lake City visit this week, returning to the familiar characters was challenging.

For starters, the animation software Pixar uses now is completely different from what was around in 2003, so the character modeling had to be redone from scratch.

"It's sort of like if you type a Word document 13 years ago. If you try to open it today, it's not going to open," Stocker said. "Building Dory was actually not as easy as we thought it was going to be. We thought, 'We have a road map. This isn't going to be too hard.' We started moving Dory, and instantly we knew something was wrong. We know what she looks like, and we know her so well, and something was just a little off."

Because Pixar likes to try the impossible, Stanton challenged the animation team with a new character: Hank, an octopus (voiced by Ed O'Neill) on the mend at the marine sanctuary, who helps Dory navigate the facility.

"He pinned this picture of Hank on the board, and the entire crew [gasped] and went, 'We're going to try that?!?' " Stocker said.

"It was super-challenging by its very nature," Stocker said of the octopus. "Anything organic is super hard in the computer, anyway, but when you see how an octopus moves … it's almost impossible to figure out how an octopus does what it does."

Stocker and his animation staff visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium, about a two-hour drive from Pixar's Emeryville, Calif., studios, to watch octopi and try to deconstruct their movements.

The computer "rig" of Hank, the 3-D model animators manipulate to make the character move, took nearly two years to build, Stocker said. Once built, a designated team of animators studied how to make the octopus's moves realistic. "We went to Hank school and said, 'How are we going to animate this?' " Stocker said. "The controls were like learning how to drive a car."

Following Pixar's collaborative method, Stocker said anyone at Pixar could pitch ideas and gags. For examples, the team was looking for humorous ways to use Hank's camouflage talents (since an octopus can change color to blend in with its surroundings).

"One animator came up with five different ideas," Stocker said. One of those ideas — to have Hank pretend to be a potted plant — ended up in the movie.

Stocker — who grew up in Spokane, Wash., and worked as an illustrator before deciding to become an animator — got his first animation job as an intern at Walt Disney Animation Studios in Florida, during production of "The Lion King." He worked 10 years at Disney, but as computer animation was booming, he moved over to Pixar, just in time to work on "The Incredibles."

"Everyone there is passionate, geeky passionate, about making movies," Stocker said. "When they make a movie, it's like, 'We're all making this movie. Everyone's super-important. We listen to everybody.'

"There's this drive to always make it better," he said. "The movie's never actually done until it's in the theater."

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow him on Twitter @moviecricket. Email him at spmeans@sltrib.com.