Finding Dory is filled with the humour, fun, adventure and heartfelt emotion characteristics that turned the original movie into one of the highest-grossing animated films of all time. DeGeneres’s voice is such a gift, and the way she uses it to breathe life into Dory is so amusing and poignant that there’s talk of nominating her for an Oscar.
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The animated film welcomes back to the big screen everyone’s favorite forgetful blue tang Dory (voice of Ellen DeGeneres), who’s living happily in the reef with Marlin (voice of Albert Brooks) and Nemo (voice of Hayden Rolence). That’s important for Dory, of course, but they also benefit the world in which she lives, because now others get to know her. Dory is good and kind and amusing, and if her parents hadn’t figured out a way to build her a path into the larger ocean, the ocean would be the worse for it.
Finding Nemo was one of the first ever films, following releases such as Toy Story, that used Pixar’s revolutionary new 3D animation techniques. They find their way to California and the Marine Life Institute. There with a great deal of help from a cranky Ornery octopus called Hank (O’Neill), Destiny, a whale shark who turns out to be a childhood friend (Olson) and a Beluga whale (Burrell) called Bailey, she eventually ends up where her house was. This is also a film about a community that willingly helps others during a time of personal crisis.
Ellen DeGeneres is once again the heart of the film as Dory.
Dory’s short term memory loss is a disability that is addressed with compassion as she sets out to find long lost parents. This obviously provides challenges for Dory, as she can’t remember names or faces, how to get home or what dangers lurk in the ocean. The eccentric characters and the humorous dialogue keeps the story going but this is a heartfelt story that directors Andrew Stanton and Angus MacLane have beautifully captured here.
Thirteen years after “Finding Nemo”, here comes the sequel with a similar title “Finding Dory”. It’s not breaking new ground.
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On my Cinema Spotlight scale, “Finding Dory” earns three lone stars out of four.
