If 2003's
Finding Nemo, ostensibly the story of a widowed clownfish’s search for
his missing son, was in fact a canny parable about the joys and anxieties of
parenthood, its 13-years-later sequel Finding Dory explores—in Pixar’s typically
whimsical, jewel-toned, sight-gag-stuffed fashion—an entirely different
existential condition of adulthood: the grown-up child’s quest to reclaim and
understand his or her ever-receding past.
This new movie’s heroine, a blue-and-gold fish voiced to perfection by Ellen
DeGeneres, played a supporting (albeit crucial) role in Finding Nemo. Dory’s
breezy inability to retain new information for more than a few seconds at a time
served, in the original film, primarily as a source of comic relief in contrast
to the high-strung and micromanaging fish-dad Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks).
As they navigated the perils of the open sea beyond Marlin’s cozy home reef, he
operated at a constant slow boil of very Albert Brooksian frustration over his
unflaggingly cheerful sidekick’s short-term memory deficits. Though it must be
said that Dory’s courage and openness to experience also permitted the
risk-averse Marlin to embrace crazy rescue-mission tactics he would otherwise
never have dared to try.
But Nemo—directed and co-written like its follow-up by Pixar regular Andrew
Stanton, who also co-wrote and directed
Wall-E—never stopped to ask why Dory’s
thought processes operated so differently from those of the marine life
surrounding her, or how she might have come to be a lone, wandering fish with
enough time on her fins to drop everything and join Marlin on his quest. Finding
Dory furnishes the forgetful fish with an origin story—a pair of words that may
strike fear into the hearts of understandably sequel-weary audiences. But the
way Stanton expands on the nature of Dory’s condition and subtly connects it to
familiar land-based phenomena, such as the existence of differently abled brains
in our own human world, means that Finding Dory often goes, if you’ll forgive
the maritime metaphor, to a level a few fathoms below the cruising depth of its
much-loved predecessor.
What it lacks in originality and narrative momentum—even more than Nemo, Finding
Dory is in essence a loosely connected series of comic-suspenseful chases,
bookended by heart-tugging moments of family separation and reunion—this new
movie makes up for in psychological acuity and sensitivity. For the first time,
starting with the very first scene, Dory’s tendency to slip in and out of a
state of distracted oblivion is presented not as a personality quirk but as an
inborn cognitive challenge, a severe learning disability that her parents
(lovingly voiced by Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy) attempt to compensate for by
teaching baby Dory (an adorable Sloane Murray) various tricks for not losing her
way. “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming,” her mother reminds her, in a
made-up chant of encouragement Nemo viewers will remember as the adult Dory’s
mantra in times of trouble.
But when little Dory forgets her parents’ repeated admonishments to steer clear
of the violent undertow that rushes past their seaweed-protected cove, she’s
washed away into the vast, lonely ocean, where her inability to recall any
particulars about her home or parents dooms her to an early life spent
navigating the perilous depths on her own. Her solitude is underscored by a
recurring image of Dory as a tiny blue figure floating, almost
indistinguishable, against a background of endless deeper blue. Finally, in a
scene that recreates line-for-line her first encounter with the distraught
Marlin in Finding Nemo, Dory gains a purpose, a home, and a kind of second
family.
Fast-forwarding to one year later—thereby skipping over all the action of the
first film—we find Dory living happily next door to the snug anemone shared by
Marlin and Nemo, now voiced by Hayden Rolence. (Alexander Gould, the young actor
who played him before, has long since aged out of the part.) But some part of
Dory still retains fleeting memories of the loving home she left so long ago,
and Marlin reluctantly finds himself and his son accompanying her on a second
journey across the open ocean. This time, they’re headed for the fictional
Marine Life Institute in Morro Bay, California, where Dory believes she can
finally locate her long-lost parents.
Once they’ve hitched a ride across the sea aboard the shell of surfer-dude sea
turtle Crush (voiced here, as in Nemo, by writer-director Stanton), Dory and her
companions are separated by chance. Marlin and Nemo make the acquaintance of
some new marine wildlife, including a pair of lethargic sea lions voiced by Idris Elba and Dominic West. (There’s something wonderful about imagining The
Wire’s Stringer Bell and Jimmy McNulty granted a second life as best buddies,
sunning themselves all day on a toasty rock.) Dory, having been scooped from the
sea by workers from the institute, is eventually befriended by a nearsighted
whale shark (voiced by Kaitlin Olson) and an under confident beluga whale (voiced
by Ty Burrell).
My favorite new character may be the misanthropic octopus Hank (voiced by Ed
O’Neill), who uses his camouflage skills and ability to survive for brief
periods out of water to help ferry Dory—whom he carries around in whatever
receptacle is available, from coffeepot to child’s Sippy Cup—from one part of
the institute to another, looking for anything to trigger her dependably spotty
memory. (Hank gets a well-earned curtain call during the credits, and another
instant fan favorite comes back for an encore after they’re over, so be sure to
stick in your seat.)
Finding Dory is more squishily plotted than the drum-tight Finding Nemo, and
some parents may find the middle section—an escalating series of antic chases
through various spectacularly rendered aquarium exhibits—a tad repetitive,
though I doubt the under-12 set will notice or care. There are more
octopus-camouflage sight gags than you can shake a tentacle, and a climactic
freeway chase sequence involving echolocation, the soothing recorded voice of
Sigourney Weaver, and a pack of sea otters so adorable their snuggling can be
effectively weaponized.
But even at its silliest and most action-packed, Finding Dory never loses sight
of its emotional center: that deeply human desire to understand where one came
from and to reunite with the creatures one loves best. Without giving the ending
away, I can say that Dory’s final fate is both a vindication of her drive to go
home and an affirmation of her ability to succeed not just in spite of, but
because of, her weird and wonderful sieve of a brain. That resolution is enough
to send viewers out of the theater afloat in a small salt-water sea of their own
making.
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