SPOILERS FOR "FINDING DORY," OBVIOUSLY, SO DON'T READ UNLESS YOU'VE SEEN THE MOVIE
Before I go any further, I want to admit that I absolutely cried multiple times during Finding Dory. The show was on its first Friday night and the theater was jam packed with not just children, but people my age who experienced Finding Nemo in theaters.
I genuinely enjoyed Finding Dory. It's Pixar's best sequel since Toy Story 3... even though that's not saying much, given Pixar's fairly recent foray into unnecessary sequel territory with mixed results. Any questions we had about Dory from Nemo are satisfyingly answered in typical crying-your-eyes-out Pixar fashion.
The literal instant the opening shot lit up the screen, the audience gasped. Tiny, baby Dory. Super adorable, right? As the scene progresses, we can see that Dory was born with short-term memory loss, but her parents were not. As the story progresses, we are treated to brief yet vital flashbacks, memories locked deep within Dory's subconscious.
In one of these flashbacks, Dory's parents are holding a private discussion as to whether they think Dory can survive on her own when she grows up. For parents with mentally and physically disabled children, this is a real concern. And this is what makes their reunion going into the final act of the film so rewarding. We also learn that Marlin is still constantly frustrated with Dory's inability to remember, and by the end of the film, he's learned that thinking like Dory isn't such a bad thing. Marlin has a fully developed brand new arc that, while touched on in the first movie, feels completely new given the emphasis on Dory.
Okay, so long story short, Finding Dory is about overcoming disabilities of all sorts and accepting those who may struggle. Much like almost every Pixar film, it's a highly positive message for not just children, but adults as well. I learned a thing or two about overcoming anxiety from last year's Inside Out, and I've been struggling with that for over a decade.
So what's the problem? Well, there are a couple of scenes in particular, both including a pair of sea lions voiced by Idris Elba and Dominic West. These sea lions lay on a rock and don't do much... other than yell at a third sea lion to stay the hell off their rock. They provide a few (admittedly stellar) laughs while helping out Nemo and Marlin. The third sea lion in question looks ridiculous with his thick, crooked unibrow and what are basically googly eyes. He literally doesn't do anything other than try to get on that fucking rock, but is excluded by the other sea lions.
So... doesn't that kind of defeat the whole message of the movie? If accepting differences in others is the central theme of the film, then why the fuck didn't they let him on the goddamn rock? Shit, even seeing him accepted onto the rock WITH HIS FRIENDS at the end of the movie would've been better than what we got. Even Ed the hyena from The Lion King was accepted by the others, even though he was just comedic relief.
I was really loving the shit out of Finding Dory until this came up. I admit that I laughed quite a bit, as did just about everyone else. It's funny, but after the laughter died down, part of me felt uncomfortable laughing at this poor sea lion who, like Dory, just wanted to be accepted. The filmmakers threw in a cheap joke at the expense of the theme. What the fuck were they thinking?
My other, less important gripe with the film: the ending. Not the tail end of the movie when they're back home, but right before that with the truck. You remember, because how could you forget?
It seemed to me that the filmmakers kept digging themselves into this situational hole. One thing after the next goes wrong, but after a certain point it just has to end. The entire sequence with the truck on the highway felt so cartoonish, so unimportant, that I was convinced I was watching a subpar Dreamworks movie. It was such a grand spectacle that unfolded like children playing with their toys. Not since Cars 2 have I seen such an un-Pixar sequence in a Pixar movie.
In fact, much of the story in Finding Dory jumped over some logic boundaries. I don't call this kind of stuff out much, but it was jarring for a Pixar film. Marlin "knows a guy" who can get them to California, but how did he find Crush if he had been surfing the currents? How did Dory and Hank get into that stroller undetected? It's little things like this, small gaps in logic and time, that really took me out of the movie. Small gripes like these are dismissive coming from just about any studio, but I do expect more from Pixar. It's just not like them to have these small gaps.
At this point I'm just nitpicking.
Really, though, I did love Finding Dory. If these gripes, the sea lions and the truck sequence, had been reworked, I would call it one of Pixar's best.
Instead it just made me cry a few times.
Even though this isn't an official review, I'm giving a little score anyway, in case you were wondering. 9.2/10 is still pretty damn good.
