Psycho's Movie Reviews #256: Finding Dory (2016)

Finding Dory is a 2016 American computer-animated adventure film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. Directed by Andrew Stanton and written by Stanton and Victoria Strouse, it is the spin-off sequel[a] to Finding Nemo (2003) and features the returning voices of Ellen DeGeneres and Albert Brooks, with Hayden Rolence (replacing Alexander Gould), Ed O'Neill, Kaitlin Olson, Ty Burrell, Diane Keaton, and Eugene Levy joining the cast. The film focuses on the amnesiac fish Dory (DeGeneres), who journeys to be reunited with her parents (Keaton and Levy).

Finding Dory premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles on June 8, and was released in theatres in the United States on June 17, 2016. It was well-received by critics, garnering praise for its animation, emotional weight, voice acting and humour. It earned $1.029 billion worldwide, and became the third-highest-grossing film of 2016, the 22nd-highest-grossing film of all time, and the fourth-highest-grossing animated film of all time during its theatrical run. Finding Dory set numerous box office records, including the biggest opening for an animated film in North America, and the highest-grossing animated film in North America.

Plot

Dory, the regal blue tang, gets separated from her parents, Jenny and Charlie, as a child. As she grows up, Dory attempts to search for them, but gradually forgets them due to her short-term memory loss. Later, she joins Marlin the clownfish, looking for Nemo.

One year after meeting Marlin and Nemo, Dory is living with them on their reef. One day, Dory has a flashback and remembers her parents. She decides to look for them, but her memory problem is an obstacle. She suddenly remembers that they lived at the "Jewel of Morro Bay, California" across the ocean when Nemo mentions the name.

Marlin and Nemo accompany Dory on her journey. With the help of Crush, their sea turtle friend, they ride the California Current to California. Upon arrival, they explore a shipwreck full of lost cargo, where Dory accidentally awakens a giant Humboldt squid, who pursues them and almost devours Nemo. They manage to trap the squid in a large shipping container, and Marlin berates Dory for endangering them. Her feelings hurt, Dory travels to the surface to seek help where she is captured by staff members from the trio's nearby destination, the Marine Life Institute.

Dory is placed in quarantine and tagged. There she meets a grouchy but well-meaning seven-legged octopus named Hank. Dory's tag marks her for transfer to an aquarium in Cleveland. Hank, who fears being released back into the ocean, agrees to help Dory find her parents in exchange for her tag. In one exhibit, Dory encounters her childhood friend Destiny, a near-sighted whale shark, who used to communicate with Dory through pipes, and Bailey, a beluga whale, who mistakenly believes he has lost his ability to echolocate. Dory subsequently has flashbacks of life with her parents and struggles to recall details. She finally remembers how she was separated from her parents: she overheard her mother crying one night, left to retrieve a shell to cheer her up, and was pulled away by an undertow current out into the ocean.

Marlin and Nemo attempt to rescue Dory. With the help of two lazy California sea lions named Fluke and Rudder and a common loon named Becky, they manage to get into the institute and find her in the pipe system. Other blue tangs tell them that Dory's parents escaped from the institute a long time ago to search for her and never came back, leaving Dory to believe that they have died. Hank retrieves Dory from the tank, accidentally leaving Marlin and Nemo behind. He is then apprehended by one of the employees and unintentionally drops Dory into the drain, flushing her out to the ocean. While wandering aimlessly, she comes across a trail of shells; remembering that when she was young, her parents had set out a similar trail to help her find her way back home, she follows it. At the end of the trail, Dory finds an empty brain coral with multiple shell trails leading to it. As she turns to leave, her parents arrive. They tell her they spent years laying down the trails for her to follow in the hopes that she would eventually find them.

Marlin, Nemo, and Hank end up in the truck taking various aquatic creatures to Cleveland. Destiny and Bailey escape from their exhibit to help Dory rescue them. Once onboard the truck, Dory persuades Hank to return to the sea with her, and together, they hijack the truck and drive it over busy highways, creating havoc, before crashing it into the sea, freeing all the fish. Dory, along with her parents and new friends, returns to the reef with Marlin and Nemo.

In a post-credits scene, the Tank Gang (from Finding Nemo), still trapped inside their (now covered in algae) plastic bags, reach California one year after floating across the Pacific Ocean, where they are picked up by staff members from the Marine Life Institute.

Production

Prior to work on Finding Dory, Disney had planned to make a Finding Nemo sequel without Pixar's involvement, through Circle 7 Animation, a studio Disney announced in 2005 with the intention to make sequels to Pixar properties. However, due to the 2006 acquisition of Pixar by Disney, Circle 7 was shut down by Disney without ever having produced a film. Although it never went into production, a script for the Circle 7 version was uploaded to the official Raindance Film Festival website. Initial ideas came from the scrapped film, including the introduction of Nemo's long-lost twin brother Remy and its plot outlined Marlin was caught, whom they can be saved.

In July 2012, Andrew Stanton was announced as the director of a Finding Nemo sequel, with Victoria Strouse writing the script. That same month, Stanton examined the veracity of the news involving the potential sequel. That August, Ellen DeGeneres had entered negotiations to reprise her role of Dory, and in September, the film was confirmed by Stanton, saying: "What was immediately on the list was writing a second Carter movie. When that went away, everything slid up. I know I'll be accused by more sarcastic people that it's a reaction to Carter not doing well, but only in its timing, but not in its conceit." In February 2013, it was confirmed by the press that Albert Brooks would reprise the role of Marlin in the sequel.

In April 2013, Disney announced the sequel, Finding Dory, confirming that DeGeneres and Brooks would be reprising their roles as Dory and Marlin, respectively.

In a July 2013 interview with Los Angeles Times, Stanton spoke of the sequel's origin: "There was polite inquiry from Disney about a Finding Nemo sequel. I was always 'No sequels, no sequels.' But I had to get on board from a VP standpoint. Sequels are part of the necessity of our staying afloat, but we don't want to have to go there for those reasons. We want to go there creatively, so we said to Disney, 'Can you give us the timeline about when we release them? Because we'd like to release something we actually want to make, and we might not come up with it the year you want it.'"

In a 2016 interview, Stanton stated how the film's story came to be; "I don't watch my films that often after they're done because I have to watch them so many times before they come out. So about 2010 when we were getting Finding Nemo ready for the 10-year re-release in 3D, it was interesting to watch again after all that time. Something kind of got lodged in the back of my brain and started to sort of stew. I started to think about how easily Dory could get lost and not find Marlin and Nemo again. She basically was in the same state that she was when Marlin found her. I didn't know where she was from. I knew that she had spent most of her youth wandering the ocean alone, and I wanted to know that she could find her new family, if she ever got lost again. It's almost like the parental side of me was worried." Stanton additionally stated: "I knew if I ever said Finding Dory or mentioned a sequel to Finding Nemo out loud, I'd be done, There would be no way I'd be able to put that horse back in the barn. So I kept it very quiet until I knew I had a story that I thought would hold, and that was in early 2012. So I pitched it to John Lasseter and he was all into it. Then I got a writer, and once we had a treatment that we kind of liked, I felt comfortable calling Ellen."

Stanton selected Victoria Strouse to write the screenplay. She later said, "It was always collaborative with Andrew, but really the screenwriting was me. Of course, Andrew would do passes, and he and I would brainstorm a lot together and then we would bring it to the group of story artists. People would weigh in and share ideas." She pointed to Dory's forgetfulness as a challenge when writing the script, adding, "You don't realize until you sit down to write a character who can't remember things how integral memory is to absolutely everything we do, and that's what creates a narrative that people can follow. When a main character can't self-reflect and can't tell a story, that character is very difficult to design because she can't really lead. To get her to be able to lead and to get an audience to be able to trust her was the hardest thing to do."

The fictional Marine Life Institute depicted extensively in the film is based on the production team's research trips to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Marine Mammal Centre and the Vancouver Aquarium.

The film's ending was revised after Pixar executives viewed Blackfish, a 2013 documentary film which focuses on the dangers of keeping orca whales in captivity. Initially, some of the characters were to end up in a SeaWorld-like marine park, but the revision gave them an option to leave.

Angus MacLane was one of the first people to whom Stanton revealed his idea for the sequel. Together, with Bob Peterson, they discussed about different ideas for places Dory would visit during her journey — one of those ideas was the touch pool sequence. Later, during the Brave (2012) wrap party, Stanton invited Angus to join him in his first co-directing duty. Stanton described Angus' role as a "jack of all trades", particularly utilizing his experience in animation and story, as well as in production, having created a few short films himself.

In August 2015, at Disney's D23 Expo, it was announced that Hayden Rolence would voice Nemo, replacing Alexander Gould from the first film, whose voice had deepened since reaching adulthood (Gould voiced a minor character in the sequel instead). At the D23 expo they also announced that Ed O'Neill would be the voice of Hank.

To make the light more realistic, RenderMan was completely re-engineered, its biggest change in 25 years.

Music

The film's soundtrack was composed by Thomas Newman and released on June 17, 2016. Louis Armstrong's version of "What a Wonderful World" is played during the scene in which fish are released into the ocean as the truck Dory and Hank are driving crashes into the water. On May 20, 2016, Sia performed a cover of Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" on The Ellen DeGeneres Show following an announcement that it would be featured in the film.

All music is composed by Thomas Newman.

Release/Reception/Box Office

Finding Dory premiered on June 8, 2016, at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles. The film was originally scheduled for general release on November 25, 2015, but it was pushed back to June 17, 2016. In theatres, Finding Dory was accompanied by a short film, Piper (2016). The film was re-released for Labour Day Weekend on September 2.

Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment released Finding Dory for digital release on October 25, 2016, and on Blu-ray (2D and 3D) and DVD on November 15. Physical copies contain behind-the-scenes featurettes, audio commentary, deleted scenes, and two shorts: Piper and Marine Life Interviews; it featured interviews with the inhabitants of the Marine Life Institute about their encounters with Dory. In 2019, Finding Dory was released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Finding Dory holds an approval rating of 94% based on 338 reviews, with an average rating of 7.7/10. Its critical consensus reads, "Funny, poignant, and thought-provoking, Finding Dory delivers a beautifully animated adventure that adds another entertaining chapter to its predecessor's classic story." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned Finding Dory a score of 77 out of 100 based on 48 critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale, and those at PostTrak gave it a 91% overall positive score and an 81% "definite recommend".

Mike Ryan of Uproxx wrote, "I never thought I wanted a sequel to Finding Nemo, but here we are and I'm pretty happy it exists. And, for me, it was a more emotional experience than the first film. Finding Dory got me—it made me cry." A. O. Scott of The New York Times said that while the film lacks "dazzling originality", it still has "warmth, charm and good humour". In his review for Variety, Owen Gleiberman wrote, "It's a film that spills over with laughs (most of them good, a few of them sticky) and tears (all of them earned), supporting characters who are meant to slay us (and mostly do) with their irascible sharp tongues, and dizzyingly extended flights of physical comedy." Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal said that "Finding Dory can be touching, sweet and tender, but it's compulsively, preposterously and steadfastly funny." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and said that the film "brims with humour, heart and animation miracles", despite lacking "the fresh surprise of its predecessor".

Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "Its heroine may suffer from short-term memory loss, but viewers with any memory at all will realize that Finding Dory falls rather short of its wondrous progenitor." Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan said that, "As the 13-year gap between "Nemo" and "Dory" indicates, this was not a concept that cried out to be made."

Finding Dory earned $486.3 million in the United States and Canada and $542.3 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $1.029 billion. It was the third-highest-grossing film of 2016, the 22nd-highest-grossing film of all time, and the fourth-highest-grossing animated film of all time. It had a worldwide opening of $185.7 million, which is the sixth-biggest of all time for an animated film, and an IMAX global opening of $6.4 million. On August 16, it earned $900million in ticket sales, and on October 9, it passed the $1billion threshold. Deadline Hollywood calculated the film's net profit as $296.6 million, accounting for production budgets, marketing, talent participations, and other costs; box office grosses and home media revenues placed it fourth on their list of 2016's "Most Valuable Blockbusters".

Budget $175–200million

Box office $1.029billion

My Review

'Finding Nemo' to me has always been one of Pixar's best, colourful, imaginative, hilarious and poignant with great characters (who cannot love Bruce the shark, plus Dory speaking whale is one of Pixar's funniest moments).

Pixar have been hit and miss since 'Up', with some great films like 'Toy Story 3' and 'Inside Out' (which are two of my favourites from the studio) and some disappointments like 'Cars 2' and 'The Good Dinosaur' (don't hate them as much as many others do though, also didn't think 'Brave' was that bad {IT'S MY FVAOURITE PIXAR FILM}, and liked 'Monsters University'). While it is not as good as 'Finding Nemo', 'Finding Dory' is a worthy sequel and one of their better efforts since 'Up'.

The film does meander in places with occasional draggy pacing and a couple of rather too convenient plot devices, and Dory's memory loss shtick does get repetitive quickly that it does grate too early on. However, the animation is wonderful with an even richer colour palette perhaps than 'Finding Nemo' and matches that film in meticulous detail and visual imagination. The music score is rousing, whimsical and nuanced.

Where Pixar has always excelled at its best is the balance and execution of humour and pathos. Humour and pathos are balanced deftly in 'Finding Dory', with the humour hilarious and in abundance and the pathos bringing genuine tears and emotional power. The story is flawed and doesn't have the imagination or originality of 'Finding Nemo', but the energy, humour and emotion shine through more than brightly and one does relate to Dory in her quest, one that anybody can relate to if in her situation.

{She's adorable as a baby}

Good characters always help and actually are crucial in making a film work. 'Finding Dory' has them, not just Dory, who has lost none of her comic timing but moves the viewer as well, or Marlin and Nemo who bring sweetness and poignancy to the story, but also the scene stealing seals and gleefully entertaining Hank who provides many great moments. One does miss Bruce though. The voice acting is terrific, with Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks and Ed O'Neill being particularly spot on.

To conclude, 'Finding Nemo' is a great film, this reviewer found 'Finding Dory' to be a worthy sequel. 8/10