Finding Dory The most heart-warming film of the year
Finding Dory Cert U, 103min
Director 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 memorably crooned in Disney’s The
Little Mermaid, back in 1989. But in Finding Dory, the new film from Pixar Animation Studios, 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 persistent short-term memory loss made her such an unforgettable comic sidekick in Finding Nemo, the 2003 Pixar classic to which this film serves as an ingenious and stirring sequel. When we meet Dory here, she’s a lost child, asking passers-by to help locate her kind-eyed parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy).
Buffered by currents, she finds her way to the Australian reef that’s a home for clownfish Marlon (Albert Brooks) and his only son Nemo (voiced by Hayden Rolence). 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. That memory of her parents still glimmers – and in finding them, she surmises, perhaps she’ll find herself too.
Her odyssey takes her to a Marine Life Institute in California, whose various inmates – from a surly octopus called Hank (Ed O’Neill), to a beluga whale struggling to master sonar (Ty Burrell), and an uproarious pair of sea lions (Idris Elba and Dominic West) – do their best to reunite her with her folks. It’s worth noting there’s no villain in Finding Dory: director/cowriter Andrew Stanton understands that simply negotiating life provides all the emotional stakes required.
Where intense and complex emotions are concerned, Pixar has a history of merciless extortion. (Take the heartbreaking opening of Up, or the entirety of Inside Out, or the climactic furnace scene in Toy Story 3.)
Finding Dory doesn’t aim quite as high as those three studio personal bests. But it navigates tricky emotional territory with a perceptiveness and tact that isn’t just great storytelling, but could be a real comfort to parents and children alike who unexpectedly see themselves in Dory’s plight.
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 eminently readable as a stand-in for dyslexia, autism, a speech impediment, or any other condition that leaves a child struggling to navigate an inherently unnavigable world.
It’s no coincidence that at Dory’s lowest point, when all seems lost, Stanton takes his (virtual) camera inside her head, and we finally see things from her point of view. It’s the kind of flourish made possible by thoughtful writing and direction, but which also depends on the kind of quietly meticulous character design that allows you to accept the reality of the film’s undersea world without hesitation.
Each creation moves with the vivacity and bounce of free-range Muppets – from major players like Hank, who slinks around with totally plausible slippiness, all the way down to bit-parts like a romantically hapless giant clam voiced by Stanton himself.
Even in that throwaway nonsequitur gag – a mollusc morosely monologuing about heartbreaks past – the film’s essential compassion and humanity shines through. Who else but Pixar could craft a Day-Glo cartoon ocean where the reflection in its surface is your own?