Finding Dory

Aside from dominating the animated movie game for some time (though Disney’s other animation arm presented a strong challenge for the crown this year with the great Zootopia), Pixar has also been notable for very, very grown-up pathos in a handful of its features. There was the gaping fear of loss and obsolescence pervading Toy Story 3, or the heartbreaking first few minutes of Up. Apparently, many audiences also felt last year’s Inside Out was a bevy of emotions, though while I enjoyed the film, it didn’t quite get to me like it did for some.

As for Finding Dory…well, by and large, it’s the type of joyful, vibrantly animated delight one would expect from Pixar. But pieces of it tread towards strong, even dark emotional territory. The picture nearly gets there, too, before hitting the brakes at the last minute.

In the film, set not long after Finding Nemo, the amnesiac blue title fish (Ellen DeGeneres) starts to regain memories of her childhood and her parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy). To find them, she and her clownfish friends Marlin (Albert Brooks) and Nemo (Hayden Rolence) travel across the ocean to an aquarium in California. Unfortunately, once there, Dory is caught, placed in a storage tank, and scheduled to be transferred across the country. While she enlists the help of the park’s residents in looking for her family, Nemo and Marlin hatch a rescue plan, no easy task on dry land.

Brooks is as on game as last time, if a little less comically cowardly, but it’s DeGeneres who carries the film, stepping up from comic relief to singular lead smoothly and effortlessly. Wisely, though, returning characters outside of the main cast are kept down to cameos or framing scenes, keeping things fresh with new faces and locations instead of treading the same waters. Each new scene and sequence is a fun and clever surprise, and every new player a funny addition, the standout being Ed O’Neill applying his perfected gruff deadpan to a broken, seen-it-all octopus. It all moves at a more urgent pace than Nemo due to time constraints laid out by the plot, but never seems too breathless or frantic like so much children’s entertainment.

It’s in the moments between the big, bold, fun stuff, however, that the film delivers arguably Pixar’s most potent emotion thus far. Flashbacks of the young Dory (Sloane Murray) lost and alone, unable to remember enough to even be helped, are devastating, and I’d imagine a little terrifying for younger viewers. In a series notable for its bright, lush colors, these scenes are darker, greyer, and muted, giving them a subtle intensity. And though there are still jokes at the expense of the title character’s short-term memory loss, its depiction is more sympathetic and reasonably realistic (aside from, you know, the fact that she’s a fish instead of a human). It’s often aggravating and dispiriting, but other times, it’s a challenge that feels rewarding to overcome. And yet, that positive feeling is mostly fleeting, for what it most often reveals is a sense that Dory’s quest will inevitably end in disappointment, lost on the innocently naïve fish but not the audience.

Things are ultimately wrapped up conveniently and nicely; toy with our feelings though they have, I don’t think Pixar (or the big mouse that owns them) is ready for a decidedly unhappy ending. And that works just fine, because the picture has so much else to enjoy. Still, after pushing the envelope for much of the movie, one wonders if Finding Dory would have worked as well (or better) if they had gone all the way. I think it would have.