'Finding Dory'

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If you haven’t seen 'Finding Nemo' then stop reading this review and go watch that right now by any means you can. Done? Good. So picking up from the end of the first movie we find Marlin, Nemo and Dory have settled down at the anemone and gone back to normal life with Dory attending school with Nemo; though due to her short term memory loss never really learning anything.

However by a quirk of fate a long hidden memory jogs itself loose in Dory’s mind and she begins to recall details of her parents. The realisation that she lost them, probably due to her condition, and has forgotten them so easily proves quite the shock and Dory is soon determined to piece together every detail she can remember and find her family.

Marlin reluctantly agrees to help her on what will likely prove a dangerous quest across the ocean, an experience he is not keen to repeat. He and Nemo join Dory on her mission, finding their way to the Marine Life Institute where sea life is taken in and nursed to health before being returned to the ocean. After a mishap results in Dory being taken in by the well meaning staff of the institute Marlin and Nemo must work to find her as she befriends Hank, an octopus with curious motives, and slowly uncovers the secrets of her past.

The interesting thing in having Dory as the central character is that whilst on paper elevating the comic relief to the heroine of the story seems like a terrible idea, in this instance it works brilliantly. What was played as a joke in the first movie serves remarkably well as the emotional centrepiece of this one.

In fact, once the story got underway they pretty much stop playing Dory’s memory loss as comedy fodder and treat it as the traumatic disability it so clearly is. It really is the driving force of this movie, not just a plot device, and it’s handled very seriously. To the point you might even start feeling bad for laughing at it in the first place you monster! I’m kidding, it’s still kind of funny.

On the other side of things the Marine Life Institute is played off somewhat neutrally. Whilst when push comes to shove the movie seems firmly set in the idea that animals should be free rather than in cages (or tanks in this instance), it’s not heavy handed with this message and the humans are never portrayed as the villains of the story.

On the negative it’s not as tight as the original, some of it feels a little needlessly rambling and the new characters perhaps aren’t as well rounded and interesting as say the shark support group or the dental offices fish tank inmates from the first movie. That being said the finale is perhaps an even bigger emotional experience than the original even though the build up might be a little slow to really hook you.

So though this is not quite as perfect a movie as the original, it is a hell of a lot closer than I was expecting and gets top marks from me.

Review by Kristian Mitchell-Dolby.

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