Bravo, Pixar.
Rather than roll out some shitastic money-generating two-hour waste of my time – yes, Independence Day: Resurgence, I’m looking at your lame ass – Pixar did what it always does: Made a great film.
Finding Dory succeeds precisely because it doesn’t attempt to be or to recycle Finding Nemo. Finding Nemo is two films: And epic (the journey of Dory and Marlin) and escape/heist pic (Nemo’s attempt to get out of the dentist’s fish tank). The epic journey portion provides us with the bulk of the tension, and Marlin and Dory try to traverse the ocean while navigating its numerous dangers. Nemo’s fish tank efforts are largely comic relief, a break from the constant danger hovering over the rest of the film.
Finding Dory is a traditional Hollywood comedy, period, with a hefty dose of unreliable narrator in the form of everyone’s favorite short-term memory-challenged fish. When it comes time to travel from their home on the reef to the Marine Life Institute, Dory, Nemo and Marlin merely hop a ride with their old pals the sea turtles and bang, there where they need to be. No sharks, no jellyfish, no weird bottom of the sea fish with a light on its head. That’s not what Finding Dory is, and it makes no attempt to be that. Yes, there’s an escape element in Dory, but that’s where the real action in the film is, as opposed to functioning as comic relief and break from the darker elements.
Is Finding Dory the game-changer that Finding Nemo was? No, but it couldn’t be. Nemo introduced us to a lush, animated underwater landscape viewers had never seen before. There was really no way for Dory to top that.
Thank goodness Pixar didn’t attempt to do that. Finding Dory is all the better for it.
Adam Laredo's spot 