FALLING SHORT OF THE ORIGINAL
Finding Dory Running time: Starring: Ellen DeGeneres, Idris Elba, Michael Sheen Andrew Stanton,Angus DIRECTED BY MacLane PRODUCED BY
ILindsey Collins TS HEROINE may suffer from short-term memory loss, but viewers with any memory at all will realise that falls rather short of its wondrous progenitor.
Feeling driven more by commercial exigencies than by vital creative impulses, this 13years-after follow-up to Pixar’s fifth feature serves up enough shards of humour and visual distraction to keep small-fry happy. But its thematic preoccupation with “family” is so narrow, and its sense of narrative invention is so limited compared to that impatience surpasses enjoyment well before the predictable climax. Still, leviathan-sized box-office is assured, given the multiple brand names – Disney, Pixar and Nemo/Dory – and the fact that Nemo, at $936 million (R14bn), is the second-highest worldwide grosser of all Pixar features, second only to
Repeated viewings of released in 2003, have always rewarded due both to the film’s astonishing beauty and even more to the madly imaginative plotting, which introduced innumerable knotty challenges that were always met in delightfully clever ways. Finding Nemo, Finding Dory Toy Story 3. Nemo, The yuppie-era obsession with helicopter parenting may have been laid on a bit thick, but this ultimately gave way to more diverting concerns, especially in the escape-and-rescue strategies of the manic third act.
Here, however, the optical and dramatic possibilities available in an ocean full of sea life are shortchanged by the story’s fartoo-quick move to the physically and visually more limited environs of the Marine Life Institute in California, an aquatic rehab center (amusingly presided over vocally by Sigourney Weaver) which in less politically correct times would no doubt have been a Sea World-type entertainment park. The best new character, a colour-and-shape-changing octopus named Hank (deftly voiced by Ed O’Neill), runs rampant here in frequently funny ways, but the idea that little Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) will find her long-lost parents in this distant spot seems impossibly far-fetched.
The story, devised by the original’s writer-director Andrew Stanton, picks up a year after the conclusion of Nemo. Orange clownfish Nemo (newcomer Hayden Rolence) and dad Marlin (returning Albert Brooks) live in contented togetherness, while blue tang Dory can’t talk about much other than her memory loss... due to her memory loss.
As the comic possibilities of this disability are quite limited and/or remain politely unexploited, chatterbox Dory gets it in her head that her parents are in the above-mentioned facility in Morro Bay and convinces her pals, who can’t claim they have anything better to do, to accompany her from Australian waters on the epic voyage across the Pacific.
Despite the multitudinous opportunities offered by such a trip for high adventure and surprising underwater encounters, the grand second act potential is squandered in the film’s rush to get to the institute, where the action remains cloistered for the duration.
The MLI’s fish-friendly mission is “Rescue, Rehabilitation, Release,” a progressive policy which also provides a springboard for fun, in that one resident, the obstreperous octopus Hank, wants nothing more than to remain in captivity rather than being returned to the wild. Hank’s extreme physical antics, which involve much shape- and colourshifting along with mordant comments keenly delivered by Ed O’Neill, provide most of the film’s laughs.
More sporadic comedy comes from some of the other inhabitants, which include an intensely near-sighted shark, a navigationally challenged beluga whale and a couple of lay-about sea lions.
Certainly there’s enough goofy, boisterous comedy produced by all these energetic characters to keep kids amused.
In other words, while rambunctious and passably humorous, this offspring isn’t nearly as imaginative and nimbleminded as the forerunner that spawned it. A post-end credits epilogue is amusing enough to be worth sticking around for, and a six-minute Pixar short, in which a beach-dwelling little bird is weaned by its parents and forced to find food for itself, is charming and animated with an exceptional degree of photo-realism.
– Hollywood Reporter Piper,