New in toon
Disney’s annual D23 Expo gave us a tantalising glimpse at some of the Mouse House’s exciting movies in the making. Here’s what we learned...
FINDING DORY | Everybody's favourite animated fish is back in troubled waters…
“I’m very excited, I’ve waited for this for a long, long time,” enthused Ellen DeGeneres at D23, clearly over the moon about reprising the role of adorable blue tang Dory more than a decade on from 2003’s Finding Nemo.
A long-time champion of continuing Dory’s adventures, DeGeneres’ fish, sorry, wish is finally coming true with Finding Dory, which puts her chatterbox swimmer front and centre for her very own adventure. Though it’s 13 years since the first film netted a Best Animated Feature Oscar, Finding Dory is set just six months after she helped clownfish Marlin reunite with his AWOL son Nemo. This time around, Dory sets out to track down her parents with a little help from Nemo and Marlin, plus the first film’s ‘Tank Gang’ – Gill (Willem Dafoe), Flo (Vicki Lewis) and Jacques ( Jerome Ranft) – now free to roam the sea.
“I wanted to know that if this charming, forgetful fish ever got lost again, that she would be OK,” says returning director Andrew Stanton, who’s co-directing with Toy Story Of Terror’s Angus MacLane. “And at the end of
Finding Nemo, I wasn’t confident about that. So that’s when I knew I had another story.” That story sees Dory scouring the coast of California, only to end up at the Monterey Marine Life Institute, where she meets crotchety, claustrophobic octopus Hank (voiced by Modern Family patriarch Ed O’Neill), friendly shark Destiny (voiced by Kaitlin Olson) and beluga whale Bailey (voiced by Ty Burrell), who Dory will presumably communicate with by speaking Whale.
With Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy also on board as (spoiler alert!) Dory’s parents, we’re expecting Finding Dory to be every bit as emotional as the first film. “We waited a decade for this to happen,” DeGeneres adds. “People are going to love what we’re doing. Regardless of if you’re a Nemo fan, you’re going to love this film.”