Finding Dory (Movie Review)

A few years back, I had reviewed the 2003 Pixar animated film, Finding Nemo, as part of the 2012 Blogging from A to Z Challenge. In that review, I had remarked on how Dory had "more than stolen the show," so you can imagine my elation after I'd found out that a sequel was not only in the works, but was going to center upon everyone's favorite amnesiac blue fish. Finding Dory is that long-overdue sequel.

The movie also serves as an origin story of sorts, and as such it opens with a young (and totally adorable) Dory being schooled by her parents. It isn't long before tragedy strikes, and she is soon separated from her family and left to wonder the ocean on her own. We see her transform into the Dory we know in the course of this opening sequence, and this segues beautifully into the opening from Finding Nemo, when Marlin was about to begin his search for Nemo.

Flash forward one year, and Dory is living with the reunited clownfish family. Although still struggling with her short-term memory loss, she starts having flashbacks from her childhood. This sparks an unquenchable desire to find her long-lost parents, and soon the trio are on an adventure across the Pacific to the Jewel of Morro Bay in California.

Getting there, Dory is inadvertently captured by volunteers from a rehabilitation center for marine animals, and in an all-too-familiar twist ripped straight out of the first movie, it is left to Marlin and Nemo to try rescuing her. But it is also here that things take a turn for the unexpected, as we are introduced to a colorful cast of new characters that include a pair of territorial sea lions, a nearsighted whale shark named Destiny, and the cynical seven-legged (tentacled?) Octopus, Hank.

Finding Dory is everything an animated sequel should be; it is bigger, bolder, and beautiful to behold, plus that climax is guaranteed to have you gasping for breath.