8 / 10
A Trail of Shells
Finding Dory opens with a tiny, wide-eyed baby Dory and her parents, practising the words she’ll need to explain her memory problem to other fish. Hi, I’m Dory, and I suffer from short-term remembery loss. They drill it with her over and over, patiently and lovingly, knowing she’ll forget it anyway. Then a current sweeps her away, and she spends years wandering the ocean alone, forgetting where she came from and never quite forgetting that she’s lost something.
It’s a gut punch of an opening, and it tells you this won’t be a lazy cash-in. Finding Nemo was about a father’s fear. Finding Dory is about living with a mind that won’t hold on to things, and about the people who love someone like that.
Andrew Stanton, who made the original, came back to direct with Angus MacLane, and the film came out in June 2016, thirteen years after Nemo. It made over a billion dollars, and for once a sequel earned every cent of the money it made.
For Writers
Baby Dory’s parents rehearse the words she’ll need to explain her memory loss, knowing she’ll forget them. The prologue sets the film’s emotional stakes in a single short scene.
A short prologue that shows your character at their most vulnerable can give the reader a reason to care about everything that follows. The reader carries that image, quietly, through the whole story.
Pixar never explains the prologue or returns to it directly for a long time. It trusts the audience to remember, and when the shells appear at the end, the whole film clicks into place. A prologue should plant a seed and leave it in the ground. Explaining the flower comes later, or never. There’s more on this in my article on opening pages that hook readers.
One Memory
The story picks up about a year after Finding Nemo ends. Dory lives next door to Marlin and Nemo on the reef, helping out as a teacher’s assistant and forgetting things constantly. Then a sudden flash of memory brings back her parents and a single phrase, the jewel of Morro Bay, California, and she decides, instantly and with no plan at all, to cross the ocean and find them.
Marlin, as nervous and grumpy as ever, reluctantly goes with her, and Nemo comes too. They ride the sea turtles’ current across the Pacific, bump into Crush again and end up at the Marine Life Institute, an aquarium and rescue center on the California coast. Dory’s separated from her friends almost immediately, and the film splits into two quests: Dory navigating the Institute, and Marlin and Nemo trying to find her.
Ellen as Dory
Ellen DeGeneres carries the film. Her Dory is still funny, rambling and fearless, and this time she’s got something new underneath: a real sadness about how much she’s lost and how often she’s been alone. The scenes where Dory realizes she’s forgotten things that matter are genuinely painful, and DeGeneres makes her cheerfulness feel like courage.
Albert Brooks is back as Marlin, and his arc is gentler this time. He has to learn to trust Dory’s instincts instead of managing her. Hayden Rolence replaces Alexander Gould as Nemo, whose voice had long since broken, and Nemo becomes the quiet voice of reason who reminds his father what Dory did for them.
Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy voice Dory’s parents, Jenny and Charlie, and they’re lovely: gentle, funny, anxious and endlessly patient. Their warmth explains where Dory’s stubborn optimism came from, and why she never quite gives up.
Hank
The film’s breakout star is Hank, an octopus who’s lost a tentacle, making him, as he points out, a septopus. Ed O’Neill voices him with a gravelly, weary grumpiness, and he wants just one thing: to be shipped off to a quiet aquarium in Cleveland, away from the ocean he’s afraid of. He agrees to help Dory in exchange for the tag that’ll get him there.
Hank is a master of camouflage, and the animators clearly had a ball with him. He blends into walls, plants and posters, slides through pipes, sneaks through offices and, at one point, drives a truck. Pixar reportedly spent longer building him than any other character in the film, and every boneless, oozing movement shows it.
His friendship with Dory, a cynic slowly won over by an optimist, echoes her friendship with Marlin in the first film, and his change of heart is quietly touching. O’Neill’s gruffness keeps it from getting too sweet.
For Writers
Hank wants a quiet, safe life in a Cleveland aquarium and ends up finding friendship and courage instead. The cynic slowly learns from the optimist.
Pairing a hopeful, impulsive character with a cynical, cautious one creates natural friction and gives both room to change. Each one sees the part of the world the other has missed, and the gap between them drives every scene.
The key is to let the change go both ways. Dory learns a little caution from Hank, and Hank learns a lot of hope from Dory. A partnership where only one side grows feels like a lecture. Hank’s grumbling never fully goes away, and that’s why his kindness means something.
The Touch Pool
The best comic set piece is the touch pool. The small fish and crabs cower in terror as a crowd of children’s hands plunges into the water to poke, grab and squeeze them, and Pixar plays it like a disaster movie, with frantic warnings and desperate hiding. Any parent who’s ever watched a toddler at an aquarium will laugh out loud.
It’s pure Pixar: taking a familiar place and showing it from an angle you never considered. The Institute gives the film a great playground, full of tanks, pipes, quarantine rooms and a kelp forest, and Sigourney Weaver, playing herself on the Institute’s recorded announcements, becomes a running joke that pays off beautifully.
Destiny, Bailey and the Sea Lions
Inside the Institute, Dory meets Destiny, a near-sighted whale shark voiced by Kaitlin Olson who turns out to be her childhood pipe-pal, and Bailey, a beluga voiced by Ty Burrell who’s convinced his echolocation is broken. Their friendship, and Bailey’s rediscovery of his gift, gives the film some of its warmest scenes.
Outside, Marlin and Nemo get help from two lazy sea lions, voiced by Idris Elba and Dominic West, who guard their sunny rock and bully a third sea lion named Gerald, plus Becky, a scatterbrained loon. They’re pure, silly comic relief, and the Gerald gag is one of the funniest running jokes Pixar has done.
Almost every character in the film has some kind of limitation, a disability, a flaw or a fear, and the film shows every one of them to be capable anyway. It’s done with a light touch, and it gives the story a generous spirit. Nobody gets written off because of what they can’t do.
A Mind That Won’t Hold
Underneath the jokes, Finding Dory is a film about disability, and about the families of people with one. Dory’s memory loss isn’t just a gag here. The film shows how frightening it is to be lost and unable to remember why, and how tiring it is to explain yourself to people who don’t understand.
Her parents’ approach, patient, practical and endlessly loving, is the film’s model. It doesn’t pretend her condition will go away. It argues that her way of thinking, improvising and following her instincts, is a strength. The people around her need to learn from her as much as she needs them. That’s a grown-up message for a family film, and it’s delivered without a sermon.
The Shells
The emotional climax beats everything else in the film. Dory, alone and lost, finds a trail of shells on the sea floor and remembers: her parents taught her to follow the shells home. She follows them, and they lead to a little house surrounded by dozens of trails of shells, stretching out in every direction.
Her parents never stopped hoping. Every day, for years, they laid a new trail, just in case she remembered and came back. When Dory sees it, Pixar delivers a moment to match anything in its catalogue, and you’d need a heart of stone not to lose it completely.
For Writers
Dory’s parents laid a trail of shells to their home every day for years, in case she remembered. The trail becomes the story’s most powerful image.
A simple, repeated gesture of love or hope can carry more emotion than any speech, especially when its meaning is revealed late in the story and the reader realizes how long it’s been going on.
The shells work because the film planted them early, in a small scene of Dory’s childhood. By the time she finds them again, the audience has forgotten, just like Dory, and remembers at the same moment she does. That shared remembering is the whole emotional trick, and it only works because the seed was planted so quietly.
The Truck Chase
The final act goes big. There’s an escape from the Institute, a truck full of fish headed for Cleveland, a chase on the highway and Hank driving the truck off the road and into the sea while Louis Armstrong sings What a Wonderful World. It’s absurd, gloriously overblown and very funny.
It’s also a bit much. Pixar’s sequels have a habit of turning their finales into slapstick action, and this one tips over the edge. It’s entertaining, and it’s a step down from the quiet power of the shell scene that came before it.
An Eight, Earned
Finding Dory isn’t as perfect as Finding Nemo. The structure echoes the first film too closely, the finale’s too frantic and some of the jokes are broader. But it’s warm, funny, clever and surprisingly moving, with Hank as a brilliant new character and a message about difference that’s handled with real grace.
It’s the rare sequel that has a real reason to exist, and a big heart of its own.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Finding Dory turns a comic character’s quirk into the heart of a moving story. Her memory loss drives the plot, the jokes and the emotional climax, and the film treats it with respect.
A character’s defining trait can become the engine of a whole story if you take it seriously and explore what it costs them.
Take your most comic character’s quirk and ask what it’s like to live with it every day. The answer may give you your most affecting story.
Just Keep Swimming
Finding Dory is an 8: a warm, funny and surprisingly moving sequel, with Ellen DeGeneres giving Dory new depth, Hank the septopus stealing scenes and a trail of shells that’ll wreck you. It isn’t Finding Nemo, and it doesn’t need to be.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on one of my film lists