Finding Dory

The emotional trauma of the transition from childhood to adulthood is the bread and butter of Pixar’s films. Don’t believe me? Look at Toy Story 3, Inside Out, or Brave’s exploration of the painful growths required to move to the next phase of life or deal with a big change. Finding Dory adheres to the company’s overarching motto, but it also adds to it by opening with a young Dory’s parents teaching her skills to try and cope with her disability. For Dory, these tricks are fun and cheerful, but she’s also bright enough to realize that they aren’t cures or foolproof.

This introduction is both heartwarming for the love and support her parents provide, but also a glimpse of things to come for the rest of the narrative. We’ll get our candy-colored gloss, but that spoonful of sugar is wrapped around some strong medicine. After all, it isn’t long until Dory’s wandered too far away from the safe confines of her family home, gotten lost, and spending her entire childhood searching the ocean for a way back home. Eventually, Dory’s personal narrative is sidelined as she, and we, run right into Marlin and the unfolding story from Finding Nemo.

Finding Nemo was already a movie not lacking in plaintive moments yet this first act is one of the richest and most complex of any from the studio. It’s a spark of a memory that ignites Dory on a quest to return home and find her parents. She was already a rootable figure in the first movie, a loopy side character that we enjoyed making us laugh and wanted to see succeed, and her elevation to the main role deepens that aspect.

We spend a good of time with Dory, Marlin, and Nemo in their daily routine as they try to keep her to a steady, tightly structured path in order to constantly re-center her frequent bouts of complete oblivion. Comedy is found in the frustrations of trying to realign Dory, but it’s never mean-spirited or at the expense of her condition. It takes a while for Finding Dory’s rhythms to develop, but once a series of forced cameos from Nemo’s characters and prominent locations are over, the movie really takes off.

A majority of its running time is spent in a fictional marine life institute that emphasizes rehabilitation and release when possible. (Bonus points for that hilarious Sigourney Weaver cameo.) We also get introduced to a fun new group of supporting players that make the formulaic portions of the film, and there are a lot of them, worth the journey. Sure, the near-sighted whale is cute, but I’m deeply fond of the cantankerous, gooey-centered octopus.

It’s important to note these details that make Finding Dory unique because a lot of it repeating the past success of the original film and the studio’s larger output. The comfort foods of home and family get their usual children’s film callouts, and the adoptive family that Dory meets along the way gets taken into the fold. The reef that the Nemo characters inhabit is something of an isle of misfit aquatic creatures by the time the closing credits are rolling. Not a bad thing, nor is the film’s quiet ways in which it places us in Dory’s daily predicament of loss and confusion. Her motto of “just keep swimming” because something not only encouraging but defiant.