60Finding Nemo (2003)

For Andrew Stanton, the surprisingly moving animated tale of an overprotective clownfish searching for his missing son was rooted in his own experience as a father. Busy working on one movie after another at Pixar, Stanton felt he wasn’t seeing enough of his five-year-old son. “I made some daddy-son time to walk in the park, and I spent the whole walk going: ‘Don’t touch that,’ ‘Watch out for cars,’ ‘You’re going to poke your eye out,’” he told AP. “I sort of stopped myself and realized I was so afraid of something bad happening to him that I was missing out on the chance to connect with him.”