The Hollywood ocean of animated movies is a much bigger place than it was in 2003, when Finding Nemo was the biggest fish in the pond: Elsa has let it go, Ralph wrecked stuff and the Inside Out emotions gave us the feels.
The animated sequel Finding Dory (**½ out of four; rated PG; in theaters June 17) — bringing back Andrew Stanton as writer/director and Ellen DeGeneres as the voice of the forgetful title character — dives into the deep end but flails in trying to capture that old Pixar magic. While the animation is still top-notch and a slew of new waterlogged personalities buoy the story, it doesn’t have nearly the same sense of heart, wonder and awe as Nemo.
A new generation of film fans are getting introduced to Dory but only a year has passed in her life since she helped overprotective clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) find his son Nemo (Hayden Rolence). Dory continues to deal with her short-term memory loss, which annoys the adults in her life, but she gets flashes of the parents (Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton) she was separated from as a baby regal blue tang, as well as memories of where she grew up.
Dory and her pals hit the currents again to travel to California and the Marine Life Institute, where they get separated. Nemo and Marlin befriend a pair of sleepy sea lions with cockney accents — courtesy of Idris Elba and Dominic West — and Dory befriends a crusty octopus named Hank (Ed O’Neill), whose main goal is getting on the next truck to a Cleveland aquarium.
There was a joy in exploring the never-ending ocean and its colorful inhabitants in Finding Nemo, but that's missing in Dory. Also, the follow-up has an uneven tone overall — Marlin and Nemo are in the movie just to argue with each other, and Dory’s amnesia schtick gets old quickly. Yet DeGeneres adds a youthful naivete and innocence that at times makes Dory the funniest character in the film, like when she almost gets accidentally pulled into a sex-ed talk with a bunch of little fishes.
The hijinks in the institute are a highlight: The sea lions are great, as is Dory’s childhood whale shark friend Destiny (Kaitlin Olson) and her beluga buddy Bailey (Ty Burrell), though Hank is the seven-tentacled big man on campus. He’s got loads of attitude, his ability to blend in helps Dory on her mission, and somehow the dude knows how to drive a large transportation vehicle.
It’s strange to discuss realism in an animated movie with talking fish, yet the situations that Marlin and Co. got themselves into didn’t seem that odd in the first movie. You could buy little sea creatures trying to find freedom by jumping out of a dentist's fish tank. But there is one sequence in Finding Dory that, while highly entertaining, comes right out of a Fast & Furious movie and rings as weirdly out of place.
Outside of Toy Story, Pixar hasn’t found the right formula in its sequels to repeat the success of its original classics. Mark Finding Dory down as another that falls short of unforgettable.
