The experience: A digital Nemo hides in an actual ship

The trick: Digital projection that displays on any flat surface

The brilliance of The Seas with Nemo & Friends is how organic it feels. You enter the world with Marlin and Dory search for Nemo. It doesn’t exist in real life, but Disney immerses you in this story so deeply that you buy into the illusion.

Part of the reason that you willingly go along with the fiction involves the implementation. Imagineers constructed detailed set pieces for the attraction. The coral reef is artificial, at least until the last few seconds of the ride, but it looks real from the Clamobile.

With a believable backdrop in place, cast members played with evolving technologies to tell the story even better. An animation of Nemo (and friends) gets digitally projected into the appropriate scenes. Some of what you watch on the ride is real, while other parts require this projection.

In one memorable scene, Bruce the shark spots Nemo in a shipwreck. While a vegetarian by nature, Bruce has always wanted to eat Nemo as a light snack. He wonders whether clownfish taste funny, after all. Having failed on his chance in the movie, Bruce tries again in this sequel story of sorts.

Bruce exists in two forms on the ride. He’s a computer animation on a standard display, but Imagineers also physically recreated him at one point. It’s a 3-D effect where a shark seems to lurch at the audience. Since Bruce is navigating a sunken ship, he can’t quite reach you.

Nemo acts fearless around Bruce and even taunts him. This series of events leads to a subtle but extremely impressive Imagineering trick. A physical ship sits in front of a digital projection screen of Bruce. You would expect Nemo to appear in the latter part of the ride.

Instead, Nemo moves in and out of the holes in the ship, the thing that an Imagineer physically built and placed on the staging area for the scene. Nemo gets digitally projected in these gaps, building an illusion that he’s swimming through something that exists in the real world.

While digital projection anchors several Disney nighttime presentations today, its usage on The Seas with Nemo & Friends was genuinely groundbreaking.

The experience: A righteous swim through the East Australia Current

The trick: straightening the ride path and building a long wall of TVs

Generally, when you’re on a dark ride, you view the proceedings from a distance. You're almost aloof in that you’re far away from what’s happening. That’s by design, as Walt Disney himself planned dark rides to work this way. He wanted to control perspective by giving riders one place to look.

By keeping the ride cart away from the action, everything seems larger than life. It's a storytelling technique that's been a staple of Imagineering since the very beginning. The Seas with Nemo & Friends daringly flips the script.

Perhaps the most memorable part of Finding Nemo the movie involves an underwater surfing session. Marlin and Dory encounter Crush and Squirt, who want to help them locate the missing clownfish. They ride the wave, so to speak, to shorten their journey, although it ends badly when a whale swallows them.

Imagineers wanted to simulate this sensation during the ride experience. Unfortunately, surfing on dry land is impossible, and Disney certainly wasn't going to let park guests inside any part of the aquarium. So, some enterprising cast members came up with an inventive solution.

At one point, the ride path straightens. All Clamobiles follow in a straight line down this stretch. A giant wall of digital displays tells the story in front of the Clamobiles. It’s not all the same display, as an attentive rider will notice when a shadow falls across the screen. It’s a subtle hint that you’re at the gap between monitors. You’ll never notice unless you’re looking for the gaps, though.