Review – Finding Dory

Finding Dory is the best Pixar film since Toy Story 3 (2010).  It takes everything that was great about Finding Nemo (2003) and elevates it to new heights.  It’s a funny, exciting, captivating sequel featuring great characters, new and old, and will pull at the heartstrings as much as any other Pixar movie.

Finding Dory takes place one year after the events of Finding Nemo.  This time, Dory (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres) searches the entire ocean and an aquarium to find her parents she lost when she was a child.

Ellen DeGeneres once again shines as Dory.  Her work in Nemo is some of the best voice-work I have ever heard and in Finding Dory, she is able to take the characters and give her even more personality and layers unseen in most animated movies.  Along with Dory, we get one of the best casts of the year. Albert Brooks reprises his roll as the over-protective clownfish, Marlin, and is once again great.  Ed O’Neil is excellent as Hank, an octopus who’s escaped his cage and helps Dory on her mission in the aquarium.  Katlin Olson is hilarious as the near-sighted whale shark Destiny and Ty Burrell has some great one-liners as the broken beluga whale, Bailey.  In a nice reference to my favorite show of all-time, The Wire, Idris Elba and Dominic West play two lazy sea lions.  And Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy are simply perfect as Dory’s parents, Jenny and Charlie.

Like most Pixar movies, Finding Dory starts off with a roundhouse kick of emotion, showing us baby Dory learning from her parents, to then being mysteriously separated.  It’s really sad, and has the same emotional power as the opening scene in Nemo and Up (2009).  But what the movie does best, and the most emotional part of the film, is its message about mental illness.  Dory has short-term memory loss, we learned that in the first film.  But in Finding Dory, they dive into the heart of her memory loss by making Dory feel she isn’t normal with her disability and that that is what hurts her and the people around her the most.  But what the movie shows us is that even if someone does have a mental illness, they can still do anything anyone else can, sometimes even more.  This is an important lesson for everyone to remember and really shows what it is like to have a mental illness along with how to deal with someone who has one.  It is one of the best themes the studio has ever come up with.

I recently posted my ranking of all the Pixar movies (you can read that here).  If I was to put Finding Dory on that list, it would be close to the top.  Finding Dory is a new Pixar classic.  It features wonderful characters, beautiful animation, a relevant message, and is filled with a wide range of emotions.  I loved every moment of this film and it is definitely one of the best movies of 2016 and one of the finest sequels ever made.

MY RATING – 4/4

Did you see Finding Dory?  What did you think?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter @kevflix or on Facebook at Kevflix.