The whale shark is always bumping into things. (“What’s wrong with his fin?” “He looks funny,” other fish-kids tease him in the original film.) Add up this whole cast of differently-abled creatures and you get a story about people with special needs, about how they make accommodations, about the unique insights they offer others, about how they succeed among everyone else.Īs is Hollywood’s way, the critters’ disabilities are portrayed with heartbreaking dignity as well as played for slapstick guffaws. Even Nemo, if you recall, has had to learn to swim with one front fin growing smaller than the other. They get separated and relying on the kindness of strangers find their way back together.Īmong those who provide them assistance are a cantankerous seven-tentacled octopus (one of the film’s gags is Dory dubs him a “septopus”), a nearsighted whale shark, a beluga whale convinced that his echolocation sonar abilities don’t work, a spastic loon, and an outcast sea lion. The sequel offers new dangers and old (turtle) friends. So Marlin reluctantly agrees that he and Nemo will tag along to help. “Yes, I know what that feels like,” Marlin says - as we all remember him losing Nemo and searching desperately for him all across the seas in the first film. I really, really miss them,” Dory tells Marlin. Until she starts having tantalizing flashes of memories of her parents and sets off on an epic journey to find them. Director Andrew Stanton (a Rockport, Massachusetts, native and director of “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E”), co-director Angus MacLane and company don’t make it explicit, but the filmmakers are mainstreaming the story of a child struggling with special needs.Ĭut to Dory (voiced again by Ellen DeGeneres) all grown-up, living with the young clownfish Nemo and his father Marlin (Albert Brooks), her memory deficits getting her into mild but charming scrapes around their coral reef. But in this case, the central character is like a child with autism who disappears to go exploring the subway, or an adult with Alzheimer’s disease who wanders away from home. “Finding Dory” is another dazzling, heartwarming Pixar dramedy. "Where are your parents?" a helpful fish asks.
“And we know you’ll never forget us.” But, of course, Dory nearly immediately, heartbreakingly does.
“We will never forget you, Dory,” her mother reassures her. “What if I forget you? Would you ever forget me?” baby Dory asks her parents. But what makes the great Pixar films so moving is a mix of humor and sadness, so in this splendid new film, Dory’s difficulty becomes pathos. In “Finding Nemo,” Dory’s forgetfulness was played for laughs. It’s an accommodation to help overcome her disability. I suffer from short-term mem-mem-memory loss,” the cute big-eyed, blue tang baby recites for her parents at the beginning of “Finding Dory,” Disney Pixar’s sequel to the company’s 2003 hit digitally animated feature, “Finding Nemo.”ĭory is practicing a line, something to remember to say to strangers when - not if - she gets distracted, disoriented and lost.
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