Fishy sequel packed with compassion
Finding Dory Cert tbc, 103 min
Dir Andrew Stanton
Starring Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks, Ed O’Neill, Kaitlin Olson, Ty Burrell, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Idris Elba, Dominic West, Sigourney Weaver (voices)
What if Sebastian the Crab has been wrong all this time? “Darling, it’s better/down where it’s wetter”, he crooned in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, back in 1989. But in Finding Dory, the new film from Pixar, the world under the sea is no bower of bliss.
Eerily beautiful, yes: kelp forests, tall as skyscrapers, bend and lean in the current, while bioluminescent giant squid glide like ghosts around the wreckage of sunken trawlers. But for a little fish lost in the biggest pond of all, it’s daunting.
That fish is Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), the bright blue regal tang whose short-term memory loss made her such an unforgettable comic sidekick in Finding Nemo, the 2003 Pixar classic to which this film serves as a stirring sequel. When we meet Dory here, she’s a lost child, asking passersby to help find her parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy).
Buffered by currents, she ends up on the Australian reef that’s a home for clownfish Marlon and his only son Nemo. Then the original film’s adventure begins, at which point we fade to the same reef one year later, where Dory is ready to embark on a journey of her own. In her mind, that memory of her parents still glimmers – and in finding them, she surmises, perhaps she’ll find herself, too.
It’s worth noting there’s no villain in Finding Dory: director/co-writer Andrew Stanton understands that simply negotiating life provides all the peril and emotional stakes required.
The film’s lightly sketched prologue shows a loving mother and father (albeit both fish) doing their best to raise a child (also a fish) with learning difficulties – and while Dory’s sievelike memory is occasionally played for laughs here, as it was frequently in
Finding Nemo, it’s also readable as a stand-in for dyslexia, autism, a speech impediment, or any other condition that leaves a child struggling to navigate their passage in the world.
It’s no coincidence that at Dory’s lowest point, Stanton takes his (virtual) camera inside her head, and we finally see things from her point of view.
This kind of flourish, made possible by thoughtful writing and direction, allows the film’s essential compassion and humanity to shine through.