If I were the type of critic—and I’m not—to rank films that come out of the same production house (in this case Pixar), I think I’d slot their latest, FINDING DORY, immediately after the movie for which it is a sequel, FINDING NEMO. And the only reason I might put it just after instead of just before is because too much of Dory feels familiar, beginning with its premise that this time around it’s Nemo (Hayden Rolence) and father Marlin (Albert Brooks) going after their memory-challenged friend Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) as she heads across the Pacific Ocean to California to find the parents she barely remembers.
A fair amount of FINDING DORY is told in flashback, the result of small slivers of Dory’s memories of her distant past returning to her, particularly ones involving loving parents Jenny (Diane Keaton) and Charlie (Eugene Levy). Dory can’t remember the specifics of being separated from them, but that’s what the plot is for, and before the film is done, we know Dory’s entire backstory, traumatic separation experience, and what exactly brought her to the point where she ran headfirst into Marlin in Finding Nemo. The memory fragments are often a bit too conveniently timed—flashbacks revealing a certain key piece of information from Dory’s past seem to arrive just in the nick of time to get her out of a particularly perilous situation. But I’ll admit, the way the pieces fall together is mildly ingenious.
When the initial memory flashes occur, supplying Dory with a small set of clues to her parents’ whereabouts, Marlin and Nemo agree to accompany her, using their old turtle pals Crush (writer and co-director Andrew Stanton) and Squirt as transportation across the ocean. Their travels take them to the Marine Life Institute—a fish hospital that rescues ill marine life, nurses them back to health, and sends them back into the ocean to live out their days. A certain percentage of marine life helped would not survive back in the wild, so the institute keeps them on display as part of an education-heavy aquarium. Naturally Dory is separated from her friend, and she lands up in fish quarantine at the institute, where Dory meets a whole new school of friends.
Easily my favorite new character is an octopus (but with only seven tentacles) named Hank (Ed O’Neill), a seasoned vet of the institute, who sees in Dory a chance to finally escape by getting hold of her ID tag, which identifies her as a someone destined for an aquarium in Cleveland. Hank has no interest in going back into the wild blue drink; he likes his regular feedings and can usually escape his tank when he feels like it. The way he camouflages himself while slithering around the park is a clever and inventive and some of the funniest sequences of the film. I haven’t seen FINDING NEMO in a while, but it feels like Dory supplies more laughs than the first movie.
Also on board to assist Dory is a captive whale shark called Destiny (Kaitlin Olson) and her friend Bailey, an injured beluga whale (voiced by Ty Burrell). Through these friendships, we learn how Dory learned to speak Whale, Bailey discovers that his sonar isn’t as broken as he’s been claiming, and the vision-impaired Destiny learns to stop bumping into the walls of her tank, more or less. While Dory struggles to find her parents in the institute (she hopes), Nemo and Marlin are attempting to sneak into the park, looking for Dory, with the help of a pair of thuggish sea lions, voiced by Idris Elba and Dominic West (even the Pixar crew loves “The Wire”).
FINDING DORY continues the fine tradition of Nemo of being one of the most visually stunning works in the Pixar collection. Between the underwater offerings and the architectural and natural possibilities of the institute, in scene after scene, Dory has a visual language that never lets up even in those moments when the story grows a bit standard-issue. A sequence set in a marine life version of a “petting zoo” is spectacular in its rendering and in letting us experience what a horror show that must be for the poor animals forced to endure children groping them day after day. (“The hands! The hands!”)
There are none-too-subtle messages about being different and finding that one thing you’re really good at (for Dory, apparently, that is NOT thinking before she acts, which some see as being especially bold). But really FINDING DORY is a colorful adventure story, complete with a car chase and monster squid attack. Having also helmed WALL-E and FINDING NEMO, Stanton (who co-directed this with Angus MacLane, a longtime Pixar animator who also has directed a pair of TOY STORY shorts) has become one of the animation studio’s most reliable filmmakers, especially in the story department. (He’s contributed to the scripts of all the TOY STORY films and MONSTERS INC. as well.)
Even I was surprised how much more emotionally invested I found myself in Dory’s plight, perhaps because she’s not only attempting to reunite with her parents but also because she has to work around this memory issue in the process. Her struggle and search seem almost more desperate, and we’re rooting for her just a little bit more. The film is sweet and funny with loads of charm to spare, and despite a few brief lulls, it all works in a wholly satisfying way. And as if that weren’t enough, the opening short Piper might be the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. The biggest bummer about FINDING DORY is twofold: we have to wait a year for the next Pixar feature, and that feature is CARS 3.
