Finding Dory (2016)

If you're around my age, there's a pretty good chance that Finding Nemo was a part of your childhood, and there's also a good chance that you really enjoyed it both then and now. It is an incredibly heartfelt and emotionally rich story that just happens to be incredibly well-animated. It also stands quite well on its own.

So, naturally, when Disney announced that they were making a sequel entitled Finding Dory, I was more than a little skeptical of how they were going to proceed. Finding Nemo to me was so self-contained that there wasn't much of anywhere to go with the story. I mean, I know that Pixar has done some good work with sequels before, but they've also misfired big time (anybody else remember Cars 2 or Monsters University?).

Thankfully, Finding Dory definitely fits into the better half of Pixar's filmography. It is surprisingly engaging and a natural progression of the first film's story, and also has some of the best animation Pixar has done yet.

How does Pixar make this story work, you ask? It's quite simple (and quite spoiler-free as well): everything revolves around Dory's condition of short-term memory loss. There's not a real villain or even a mild antagonist anywhere to be found in the entire film. This makes it a much lighter and simpler journey than Finding Nemo, but it also makes character development suffer a little bit. Granted, there's plenty of good characters that are developed quite well in the film, in particular an octopus named Hank as well as Dory herself. I'm just of the opinion that an antagonist makes a good character into a great one. That being said, for the kind of film that Finding Dory is trying to be, it actually kind of works and is not something noticed while actually watching it.

This is mostly because of the stellar voice acting. Pixar has always had a knack for finding great voices to fit their characters, but Finding Dory has some particularly good choices. Ellen DeGeneres as Dory was a great choice in Finding Nemo, and seeing the back-and-forth between her and Albert Brooks as Marlin is quite refreshing and quick-witted. As far as new characters are concerned, all of them have great casting behind them. In particular, I enjoyed Ed O'Neill as the aforementioned Hank, Ty Burrell as Bailey, a beluga whale, and Kaitlin Olson as Destiny, a near-sighted whale shark. All of them had great emotion and really made their characters come alive.

What always sets Pixar's films apart from every other animation studio's is the quality of the animation. Finding Nemo was so gorgeous when it was released and remains an incredibly groundbreaking step in animated technology. Finding Dory takes this even further. The sheer quality, depth, and texture of the animation present here is astonishing. It might be their best-looking film to date, which even to someone who understands how far computer animation technology has advanced in the past few years might be surprising.

You might be asking yourself at this point whether or not I'm going to find any significant flaws in Finding Dory. As hard as I try, I can't; however, that doesn't mean it's perfect. It's mostly just really, really good all around. It never quite reaches the stellar narrative heights of the best Pixar films that have come before it and can't seem to tug on my heart as much either, but that doesn't diminish it as a standalone film. Even though it's not the best thing Pixar has ever made (which at this point would be an incredibly hard thing to make), Finding Dory is a well-animated and emotionally tugging film that will entertain both children and their parents that bring them to see it.

My recommendation: Go see it in a theater. 

Grade: 82