Finding Dory

I went to see Finding Dory on the 31st July with my sisters, because going alone to a kids' film at 27 looks a trifle creepy. The sequel to Finding Nemo (2003), the film follows the regal blue tang Dory who has been living in the reef with Marlin and his son Nemo since they returned from their cross-ocean rescue a year before. Dory suffers from short term memory loss – the content of recent conversations and significant events from her personal past are mysteries to her, leading her to wander off or become easily distracted, which Marlin and Nemo endure with good humour. Dory has a flashback to a childhood memory and suddenly recalls that she has a family of her own: a mother and father who she became inexplicably separated from at some point in the past when she was a very young fish. Knowing she probably won’t make the journey safely on her own, given her memory issues, Marlin and Nemo accompany her to the only clue she has to her past and the location of her missing parents: the Jewel of Morro Bay, which turns out to be the Institute of Marine Life in Morro Bay, California, where injured sea creatures are ‘rescued, rehabilitated, and released’.

It’s a sweet film, with fun appearances by characters from the first film (Crush the surfer dude sea turtle and his son Squirt) and a host of new ones, from Hank the grouchy, seven-legged octopus who aids Dory in trying to find her parents inside the Institute to a pair of Cockney-like sea lions who help Marlin and Nemo get a ride inside from the open sea with the transport services of a handicapped common loon called Becky. It’s also fantastic that the protagonists of the story are a neurotic widowed single dad, his physically disabled child, and his mentally handicapped platonic friend, showing that disability is meaningless when it comes to personal worth or contribution to society. Dory may constantly forget her own friends, but she has a big heart, bravery and resourcefulness; Nemo might have difficulty swimming from his one deformed fin, but he’s insightful and compassionate beyond his years. Finding Dory also introduces Dory’s childhood friend Destiny, an extremely near-sighted whale shark who worries her inability to see properly will inhibit her from a normal life out in the ocean; Hank, who lost one of his eight tentacles in a traumatic accident that put him off living in the wild, but gets around like a ninja without any detriment; and Bailey, a beluga whale whose hypochondria has him believing he has lost his echolocation and that his bumpy head didn’t always look that way.

The film is beautifully animated, rendering a wondrous ocean glimmering with vibrant life and vivid colour, from frothing waves and drifting strands of kelp to what must be at least a hundred separate species of fish, so faithfully recreated on the screen from the real ocean that you can almost believe when you can’t see their faces that you’re actually looking into the deep blue sea. It’s incredible how far animation has come. There was a short film, Piper, which played before the main film and that showcased everything that is stunning about what people can achieve on a computer these days: individual grains of sand on a beach, every delicate feather on the sandpiper chick and his mother, the gleaming opalescence of the bubbles popping on the sand, the white crests of the waves, the movement of the incoming tide.