Fish Tale Finding Dory Is Fun, but Shallow

Joyous, touching and superbly realised, Finding Dory is a sequel worthy of the name and one could easily be even bigger than its predecessor.

Bring the tissues because Dory, Nemo and Marlin are back, and it’s no sophomore slump. However, this time it is she who gets caught by the humans, who put her in a quarantine in Monterey Marine Life Institute, later to be shipped to Cleveland.

“Finding Dory” comes with a host of new characters, including grumpy octopus Hank, nearsighted whale shark Destiny, and beluga whale Bailey. Yes, we return to Nemo’s reef to find Marlin, Dory and Nemo exactly where we left them at the end of Finding Nemo, but the film quickly progresses into uncharted territory.

What’s awesome is that Pixar has been following their familiar formula in feature films for over 20 years now, and yet they have a almost flawless record when it comes to the quality of their movies. Having much of the story take place within the aquarium instead of the ocean helps to relieve this issue. “Revisit the film that had to spoil its ending in its title so audiences could have a shred of hope to hold onto through 90 minutes of tears and torture: Finding Nemo”, the trailer begins. The most important thing I wanna say is just really embrace who you are because being unique is very, very important and fitting in is not all that matters. Favorite characters from the first movie make brief appearances as well, including Crush and Squirt the sea turtles and Mr. After Piper, a nicely paired short about a plucky seabird, we meet Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) as a cute (but still troublingly forgetful) kid who mysteriously loses her parents then wanders the ocean for years, trying to plug the holes in her sieve-like brain until she crashes into a panicked clownfish called Marlin (Albert Brooks). Just when you thought CG water couldn’t look any better, Pixar’s team went and raised the bar again with their latest offering. In Finding Dory, Stanton and his crew strike a ideal balance between art and entertainment. As with every Pixar film, it takes a village to usher its protagonist home, but Finding Dory also depicts that blue tang’s guileless empathy in action.

The film, directed by Andrew Stanton, picks up six months after “Finding Nemo”. In the same way that Monsters University added more depth to its colorful characters, so too does Finding Dory – perhaps even more so – and it’s a testament to Andrew Stanton that this underwater world feels just as dynamic as it did back in 2003. In the first film, Dory’s forgetfulness was often the (gentle) butt of jokes, so by plunging us into a story where this memory loss is now a cause of grave concern, the sequel subtly interrogates the original.