Normally, I agree with the majority of viewers on which Pixar features are among the best and which are merely OK. Finding Nemo has been the glaring exception: I found it uncreative, overly simple, immature, and unwholesomely preachy. The humor, especially surrounding Dory's anterograde amnesia, is both predictable and politically incorrect. I almost declined my parents' invitation to see Finding Dory in a theater. But maybe my tastes had changed in 13 years. Besides, one reviewer intrigued me by talking about its special positive meaning for people with mental disorders and their families. Being such a person, I had to give it a shot.
Indeed, Dory's not so happy-go-lucky as a main character, nor is her problem played nearly so much for laughs. The movie begins with a look back at her early childhood, with parents lovingly compensating for her "short-term remembery loss." (Many in the theater awwed at the adoryble, strangely rotund, bug-eyed little blue tang voiced by a 7-year-old.) At some point, she got lost, which is 10 times worse with her condition. Fortunately, a young fish is much more self-suffishent than a young human, so she reached adulthood on her own, albeit still searching for her parents -- right up to the moment she met Marlon, whose more pressing search made her forget her own problems altogether. One year later, she suddenly remembers a big clue and heads off on her adventure anew. As more flashbacks come to her, the mystery unfolds.
In FN, most of the action takes place in either the ocean or a dentist's fish tank. Here the focus shifts to a marine biology institute, large enough for our heroes to have trouble finding each other all the same. How do they even move from one wet area to another? Usually with help, as from a bird, a whale shark, or...Hank the cranky "septopus," who might as well be reclassified as an amphibian for his abilities.
...Yeah, despite a correct fact about the octopus having three hearts, you'd better teach your kids not to read too much into the science herein. A subtler example is how the fish thrive equally in saltwater, freshwater, and mop bucket water. And you thought "All drains lead to the ocean" was bad. I still can't get behind the moral lesson either, which amounts to "Don't plan; just charge forward." Real life doesn't favor that strategy.
Don't get me wrong; I like the change of venue. It adds variety, and the strong presence of human stuff helps make up for an element of literal fish stories that's bored me: They can't do much besides swim. No more parade of episodic encounters in the wild punctuated by tank life.
FD passes the Bechdel test, but might I say, one thing I've always appreciated about Dory is that her gender doesn't matter at all. Pixar could have made her male and changed only her voice and third-person pronouns, and no one would find the result off-putting. (She and Marlon have an ill-defined familial type of love, not a romance.)
And how are the two clownfish, you ask? Well, I'm afraid Marlon has become less likable. It's one thing to say no to obviously needless perils; it's another to decline the most promising transportation at important moments because it makes you uncomfortable. I'm not sure how much Nemo (with a new voice actor, of course) is supposed to have matured in one year, but he's now treated as always right in contrast. Hard to recognize the kid who got into a world of trouble by ignoring his dad in the first place.
The plot reminds me a little of Toy Story 2, in which Woody involuntarily winds up in a place that gets him back in touch with his roots, and then he has to choose whether to go home or move on to a distant exhibit. Dory doesn't intend to get taken into the institute, but it does bring back a lot of memories. And in both films, unlike in their predecessors, the main worry is not death but separation.
On that note, how strange that a sequel with less danger and a lower piscine body count got a PG rating. I mean, G-rated FN begins with the disappearance of Nemo's mom and siblings, presumably into the mouth of a barracuda, and ends with a fish swallowing another on screen. Either the MPAA has revised its standards since, or explicit use of the word "dead" vastly trumps a brief shot of blood.
The best I can say about FD is that it gets frequently cute and eventually quite poignant, with no major antagonists. The worst is that it half-begs not to be taken seriously, not least in the climax. In that sense, the odd combination of impressively hyperrealistic environments and goofball character designs seems appropriate.
I put FD on the same tier as The Good Dinosaur. Not one of the best, but a few leagues above FN. I don't regret not waiting for the DVD.
P.S.: The opening short, "Piper," confused us at first, because its seaside setting led us to think FD had started. Even more than FD, it looks almost real. And even more than FD, it goes for cute over imaginative compared to other Pixar entries.
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