Finding Nemo sequel director Andrew Stanton says in a new interview that Finding Dory is happening because parent company Disney wanted it.

“There was polite inquiry from Disney [about a ‘Finding Nemo’ sequel],” says Stanton, who is also a vice president at Pixar, in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. “I was always ‘No sequels, no sequels.’ But I had to get on board from a VP standpoint. [Sequels] are part of the necessity of our staying afloat, but we don’t want to have to go there for those reasons. We want to go there creatively, so we said [to Disney], ‘Can you give us the timeline about when we release them? Because we’d like to release something we actually want to make, and we might not come up with it the year you want it.’”

Added Stanton, “It’s more often that somebody fails at a sequel than they succeed. You don’t want it to be derivative or redundant.”

The comments may not come as a shock, but it’s interesting that the director would be candid about this request.

Plans for a sequel that they “actually want to make” must’ve fallen in place earlier this year before Pixar and Ellen DeGeneres announced that a Finding Nemo sequel was in the works with Dory at the helm.

“One thing we couldn’t stop thinking about was why she was all alone in the ocean on the day she met Marlin. In ‘Finding Dory,’ she will be reunited with her loved ones, learning a few things about the meaning of family along the way,” Stanton said when the sequel was announced in April.

One now-classic example of a Pixar sequel gone bad is Cars 2. The film failed critically, and most fans (except the kids) didn’t like it because it lacked the heart most Disney/Pixar movies hold. It was clearly an attempt by Disney to push more merchandise out because kids were big fans of the original Cars. Disney likely has similar motives with their spin-off Planes which hits theaters this weekend.

Finding Dory will open in theaters November 25, 2015.

Thanks, LA Times via Pixar Times.