Movie Review: Finding Dory

Dory: “Do you know how it feels to be looking for someone?”

Marlin: “Yes...”

Finding Nemo was a hard film to beat. It won a slew of awards, earning almost a bil­lion dollars in the box-of­fice and won the hearts of thousands of young kids the world over. For thir­teen years, the film about a clownfish searching for his son was the only chapter of this heartwarming tale. Un­til this year.

If you’re into mov­ies that focus more on the dark, emotional, and seri­ous aspects of the film, then if you haven’t already, watch Finding Dory. Finding Dory is one of the best in recent memory.

The movie starts ap­proximately a year after Finding Nemo, and Dory (Ellen Degeneres) has now moved in with Marlin (Al­bert Brooks) and Nemo (Hayden Rolence, taking over from Alexander Gould who played Nemo in the original film.) Dory is start­ing to remember that she has a family, but she doesn’t know what happened and she barely knows where she last saw them. She then asks help from Nemo and Marlin to find them. After Crush the Turtle (Andrew Stanton, the film’s director) and his gang bring them to the “Jewel of Morro Bay, California” – a marine park called the Marine Life Insti­tute.

Dory gets captured by the marine biologists, and Nemo and Marlin need to find her. Dory finds her­self in a fish tank inside the Marine Biology Insti­tute. She meets an octopus named Hank (Ed O’ Neill), as a guide, and an octopus who decides to move away to a seapark in Cleveland. Dory also reunites with her childhood friends – a belu­ga whale named Bailey (Ty Burrell) and a near-sighted whale shark, Destiny (Kati­lin Olson). More new char­acters include the sea lions Fluke and Rudder (played by Idris Elba and Dominic West, respectively), who help Nemo and Marlin get in with Becky, and Gerald (Torbin Xan Bullock), an­other sea lion who is much like Becky. With their help, Dory eventually finds Nemo and Marlin. After a roll­ercoaster of emotions and flashbacks, she finds her parents.

The general theme of the film is about family. One must note Dory’s de­sire to cross the sea along with Marlin and Dory sig­nifies the power of love of family. After all, what else can drive a fish to cross al­most 10,000 miles across the world’s widest ocean and in an unfamiliar place she has not seen in well over a decade? And though Dory may have found a new fam­ily in Nemo and Marlin, she still has the urge to reunite with her parents, as any normal person would do. At the end, when all is well, they all return home to en­joy a new life as an extended family.

It’s evident that Pixar lacked giving Nemo and Marlin a bigger role in the movie, thus lack­ing character development. That being said, it is called Finding Dory for a reason, and there are also some things that carry from the first film that work. Dory is as scatter­brained as she was in the original, and still manages to be as lovable and sweet.

This film does have a bit of its controversies, however. The first is the ending. Pixar’s original plan involved the whole cast electing to move to a sea park somewhere across the country. According to a report by the Guardian in 2013, they changed it upon seeing a documentary called Blackfish, which told of the real-life killer whales at Sea­World that attacked their handlers, and the problems of taking away wild ani­mals and cruelly putting themselves on show for the sake of entertainment. Pix­ar, perhaps not wanting to send the wrong message to audiences that keeping ma­rine animals in captivity is fine, altered the final end­ing so that they could prove a point – keeping wild an­imals in captivity is wrong. Not only that, but it is also against the Claretian value of respect for life. Animals too deserve respect, and as stewards of creation, people must not abuse nor exploit them. These actions serve to work against our responsi­bility.

Then there’s the two characters who, as some moviegoers pointed out, may very well be lesbians. While the film-makers themselves told in an arti­cle by The Guardian that it would be up to the audience to decide if they really are a same-sex couple, it is still a very controversial topic to consider. Anti-LGBT sup­porters and Pro-LGBT sup­porters may get into a very heated debate about this one topic and overthink about it too much.

In the end, Finding Dory can be summed up as this. It still has the punch of heartwarming and fun­ny that made the first film great, and is a worthy ef­fort for Pixar, despite a few bumps and things one has to consider. Of the an­imation in this movie, it is better compared to the one in Finding Nemo. One can see the differences in the 3D animation and how it grad­ually improves over time in each Pixar film.

Finding Dory doesn’t top other Pixar films of the decade, like the 2015 ani­mated film “Inside Out”. But it is still worth watch­ing if you liked Finding Nemo, or any other Pixar film.

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