Thirteen
years after the wildly beloved Finding
Nemo comes the follow-up, Finding Dory, which seeks to give fans the
full story on the comic-relief character. In this year of
belated sequels to films that didn't need one, Finding Dory
is one of the rare exceptions on whether it's worth one more go-around
to haul the family to the theater to see. As with the best of
the Pixar films, it delivers a good mix of humor and emotional
content, with heartening themes of family that will likely have
parents and kids hugging one another just a little tighter the next
time they do so after seeing the film together. While it's not
quite as good as Finding Nemo, and most fans of the studio
will not rank it among the upper echelon of Pixar releases, it's a
better film than their sequels like Cars 2
and Monsters University.
With the exception of a few flashbacks to Dory's early days as a baby
fish with her loving mother and father, most of the events of this
follow-up takes place about a year after the adventure in Finding
Nemo. Ellen Degeneres (EdTV, Mr.
Wrong) voices the short-term memory-addled Dory as an adult blue
tang, continuing her friendship with clownfishes Marlin (Brooks,
Concussion) and his son
Nemo (Rolence) in the reefs near Australia. Dory is struggling
to remember her parents that she was separated from at an early age,
though she sometimes remembers fragments of those early days, with
enough clues to set out on her own to try to find them in, "the jewel
of Morro Bay, California." With worrywart Marlin and excitable
Nemo in tow, Dory sets off on her quest for a (hopefully) happy
reunion across the Pacific, where a marine-life rehabilitation
facility may hold the key to the mystery of the parental whereabouts,
if only the new creatures she meets can help her remember the clues
along the way.
While we see many of the same cartoonish but appealing characters, and
it also features a plot line of one family member in search of
another, Finding Dory
manages to find enough separation in its locale and basic structure to
minimize the typical sequel weakness of being a mere regurgitation of
the first entry. New characters brings forth new jokes, and the
new setting, which utilizes lots of photorealistic environments
outside of the ocean, breath new life into a storyline that could
easily have come off as stale leftovers. There are also a few
surprising moments of sympathetic seriousness, rounding out a
character that had largely been one-note in her original appearance.
The themes of family and what it means to find home are still here,
but rarely in a way in which it feels regurgitated, at least for those
who have several years separating the viewings of both films.
Returning as a creative force is Andrew Stanton (Wall-E,
A Bug's Life), who co-wrote and co-directed the original Finding Nemo, and handles the many
turns in the narrative and heartwarming tone of the emotionally
layered film without much of a hiccup. It's
not as impactful as Finding Nemo, and it doesn't merit the same
rewatchability factor, but there's plenty here to impressed with on a
first-time watch. As for where the film series goes from here,
if indeed it does, there are a number of potential secondary
characters worthy of their own quest, from Hank (O'Neill,
Wreck-It Ralph), the crafty,
chameleon-like octopus (or a "septipus", as he is missing one arm)
looking for a free pass to a life at the Cleveland Zoo, Destiny
(Olson, The Heat) the
nearsighted whale shark, Bailey (Burrell,
Muppets Most Wanted) the
echolocation-challenged beluga whale, and a couple of rascally Cockney
sea lions named Rudder (West, Money
Monster) and Fluke (Elba,
The Jungle Book). If those
films can be of the same quality as the first two, let's hope it won't
be another thirteen years before we see these characters again.
-- There are extra scenes featuring the characters during the credits,
and a short extra scene after the credits.
Qwipster's rating
:
©2016 Vince Leo
