"Finding Dory" Review

After a really long hiatus for not much of any reason, I'm finally getting to actually writing reviews for all the films I saw this June. And I'm gonna start with Finding Dory, which is an animated comedy adventure film from Pixar and a sequel to the hit 2003 film Finding Nemo. Set one year after the events of Nemo, the film follows clownfish father and son Marlin (Albert Brooks) and Nemo's blue tang friend Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), who suffers from short-term memory less, suddenly having sort of visions of her past with her parents, who she has not remembered in years. Dory becomes determined to find them, finding remnants of her past on the way and eventually being led to a marine life research institute and museum on the coast of California, with Marlin and Nemo desperately following behind her. There she meets a stretchy, cranky, camouflaging octopus named Hank (played by Ed O'Neill), a whale shark (Kaitlin Olson), and a beluga (Ty Burrell). Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Dominic West, Idris Elba, and Sigourney Weaver provide supporting voice roles.

With the exception of last year's Inside Out, Pixar has been exceptionally unexceptional since Toy Story 3's release in 2010. I seem to be in the minority, but I think Finding Dory is a continuation of that. Finding Nemo is a nearly perfectly crafted animated family adventure film with a fluid screenplay filled with charm and wit that navigates its huge supporting cast and myriad of obstacles incredibly well, never slowing down but never growing stale, and ends up being a fairly subtle but very sweet and intelligent statement on over-protection and the importance of being able to let go, another example of Pixar's penchant for slightly unconventional but important and well-communicated messages in children's films. Finding Dory, on the other hand, aims to make a thinly veiled statement about mental disabilities and differences in general and the importance of using your own strengths and weaknesses to their advantage, and mostly succeeds, but at the expense of doing anything fresh or exciting.

Don't get me wrong - this is a competently done animated film, and if you've already scrolled down to see my score for it, you know that I must've had some kind of good opinion of it, and I do. Finding Dory is also a lot of fun, and unlike Cars 2's embracing of its predecessor's crowd favorite supporting character in Mater, actually adds a fair amount of dimension to the character of Dory. She's no longer simply the source of silly jokes, but something about her condition is actually a little bit heartbreaking. In my opinion, none of the movie's tear-jerkiest moments ever come close to the depth or emotional weight of Dory's speech to Marlin during Finding Nemo's third act, and for that matter neither does DeGeneres's once again wonderful vocal performance, but Pixar plays the requisite Pixar notes well enough, and it seems to have worked out for them. This goes without saying being a Pixar film, but the animation in the movie is absolutely brilliant, and the film gives you plenty of luscious undersea landscapes to ogle at their vivid attention to detail and beautiful colors.

Unfortunately, much like Cars 2, while this film's character is much more compelling (and far less annoying) than Mater, the film's narrow focus on Dory subtracts from every other character in the film, both our main characters from the last film and most of the new supporting characters, who exist without much depth and aren't particularly funny. The notable exception is Hank the octopus, who is by far the best thing about the film, both O'Neill's gravelly and curmudgeonly vocal performance as him as well as the wonderfully imaginative physical humor his character brings in. Other than that, every character feels flat and mostly useless, to the point that you sometimes forget that Marlin and Nemo were actually the emotional crux of a whole other movie. It's almost like Finding Dory is less a sequel to Nemo and more like an anthology film where we follow the exploits of a side character that give dimension to, but are mostly inconsequential to, the characters of the main story.

I think therein lies my biggest problem with the film - it doesn't feel like it needed to be told. Especially considering it's been thirteen years since the first film, this feels like too little too late. Something about the way the screenplay flows, as well as the film's flimsy premise and the timing of its release, make me think that the film began with the decision to make a film about the favorite character from Pixar's second-highest grossing film, rather than beginning with the decision to tell a story. Dory and her friends jump effortlessly from one impossible cartoonish scenario to the next with the only emotional weight being delivered through quick snippets of dialogue (all of which are incredibly on-the-nose), and especially during the third act gets particularly ridiculous, to the point that it mostly feels like the writers were throwing out weird ideas for stuff to happen without having it flow well together. And I think that quality comes out of the fact that Finding Dory mostly exists because of Dory's popularity.

I don't want to seem like I'm bashing on the film, because I did like it, but I thought it was incredibly average, which automatically puts it at the lower end of the Pixar crop. The message is nice enough, though maybe not entirely accurate (be yourself and things will work out), but feels tacky and conventional, and its connection to mental illness stigmas seems mostly concocted afterward by social media posts and isn't a totally complete picture using just the film's script. The movie moves along fine enough, but never seems to build to anything in a satisfying way. And, probably most importantly, it doesn't feel like a part of the Nemo universe that was worth waiting 13 years for. That said, Dory is done justice, and once again, the requisite (albeit more superficial and simplified) Pixar notes are hit well enough to most likely appease most.

Overall, Finding Dory is a perfectly fine family film that I'm sure kids will enjoy and will probably provide adequate nostalgia for fans of the first film. For me, though, it was much less intelligently crafted than Finding Nemo and didn't go nearly as deep as Pixar's best efforts, and outside of Hank, wasn't ever quite funny or charming enough to make up for that. That said, the film does a good job delivering the tear-jerky moments as well as a fair amount of charm and requisite visual splendor, albeit, in my opinion, lacking cohesion or anything matching the emotional weight of the first film. Again, I liked it, but "average" isn't a great descriptor for a Pixar film. I'm sure I'll like it better than Cars 3 next year though.

Grade: B