Finding Dory Is a Wonderful, Huge Adventure With Emotion to Spare

In a scene where Dory cries, DeGeneres says she shed real tears.

That’s slight hyperbole. The Ellen DeGeneres Show host has long discussed, and, yes, campaigned for a sequel to the fish tale of Dory helping a clownfish father (voiced by Albert Brooks) searching for his lost son Nemo.

The new characters, including Dory’s whale friend from her childhood, a beluga whale who hasn’t discovered his true powers yet, two sea lions with thick Aussie accents and a Becky with the weird hair promise more than a few bouts of hearty laughter.

One lucky reader stands the chance to win a double ticket for Finding Dory. The 50-year-old Academy Award victor, who last directed the live-action film John Carter (2012), said that he’d felt Finding Nemo was incomplete after he saw the film again when Disney released it in 3D. The chain store Petco did, but with a nod toward the concerns, they are encouraging you to buy a freshwater Betta, the Siamese fighting fish (which comes in blue), and surround him with plastic versions of Dory and Nemo.

She’s no less lovable in Finding Dory, but the sequel suggests her short-term memory loss is more than a quirk: Dory has special needs. General release from Friday 29 Jul.

-A.O. Scott [New York Times]”Dory is still irrepressible in Finding Dory, still making her way brightly and cluelessly through life in a state of perpetual now, but her backstory adds a steady element of pathos to a movie that otherwise follows in the same beats as the original”.

But of course, Dory is no Mater and DeGeneres is no Larry the Cable Guy.

Dory has new friends Destiny and Bailey.

“You have to know the care that’s involved with these animals”, he said. Similar to the shark scene in FINDING NEMO, there is a chase scene involving a hungry squid that might give the extra little ones a scare, but nothing to cause pause any differently from other Disney films. By then, Dory’s short term memory is less a comedic running gag and more of the tragic affliction it really is, or at least what it appears to be. It seems nearly counterintuitive to make a movie about Dory: she can’t remember anything for more than a few minutes, and much of her objective in the original movie was to move the plot forward.

The original movie was powered by all kinds of characters with handicaps, from Dory’s memory to Nemo’s “lucky fin”, Marlin’s PTSD like state over losing the rest of his family years ago, and the scars of tank leader Gil. Who are her parents? But the provisions don’t coddle her and they don’t hold her back; they are built for her so that she can succeed in a world that is most definitely not built for her. One thing they don’t do is try to fix her.

The challenge for the directors was telling her story in a way that wasn’t exclusive to children with disabilities.

Dory’s parents are “scaffolding”, he says, or providing a structure that allows kids to function within their abilities, then gradually removing that structure until they’re able to stand on their own. While it’s mostly a watered-down retread, I’m sure FINDING DORY is a welcomed retread to pursue for most audiences.

Pixar’s sequels to date have ranged from the sublime (Toy Storys 2 and 3) and the serviceable (Monsters University) to the unnecessary (Cars 2).