It’s become increasingly necessary to manage expectations before walking into a new Pixar feature. At this point, the studio that once could do no wrong has faltered as regularly as it’s soared. A string of masterpieces—beginning with Finding Nemo in 2003 and ending with Toy Story 3 in 2010 (and ignoring 2006’s vehicular wreck)—proved children’s movies could surpass the bulk of Oscar contenders in terms of formal sophistication and joyful tears. That Pixar followed the remarkable Toy Story 3 with Cars 2 served as an ill omen: one that Brave, Monsters University, and The Good Dinosaur only underscored (despite their relative merits). Inside Out was an emotionally powerful comeback, but it couldn’t erase the nagging concern that Pixar’s greatness was no longer a safe bet.
The studio’s latest computer-animated spectacle, Finding Dory, doesn’t tip the scales in either direction. At any one moment it can be fabulous, both wry and heartbreaking at once. But much of what it offers feels like shopworn, beat-by-beat rehashes of its wonderful predecessors. Nevertheless, the film is such a technical marvel, and a sturdy Pixar entry in general, that its specifics seem beside the point.
Finding Dory is an adventure story blended with a reunion yarn, a familiar narrative template that goes back to the first Toy Story installment. Think of it as an inverse to its forerunner, Finding Nemo, now with Ellen DeGeneres’ Dory hoping to reunite with her blue tang parents Jenny and Charlie (voiced by Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy), once long forgotten and then suddenly remembered. Marlin and Nemo (Albert Brooks and Hayden Rolence) are back and along for the ride, if marginalized and seemingly shoehorned in for continuity’s sake. Instead of a dentist’s office, the central setting (and prison) here is a public aquarium, a watery zoo that’s also a place of scientific research. So Dory takes the bulk of Nemo’s plot devices, adds new complications, set-pieces, and marine creatures and then rinses and repeats.
Still, its visual effects are dazzling. Scene after scene, the natural underwater landscape that directors Andrew Stanton and Angus MacLane present can appear more alien and awesome than the terrain of your typical sci-fi blockbuster (and something to relish in IMAX 3D). A host of new aquatic characters are delightful, particularly the chameleonic octopus, Hank (a woeful Ed O’Neill), the nearsighted whale shark, Destiny (an exuberant Kaitlin Olson) and a swimming Global Positioning System named Bailey (a buoyant Ty Burrell). And yet, the film’s central thematic thrust, with DeGeneres’ title character fighting to overcome her cognitive disability, should feel revolutionary, a cinematic device akin to the dramatized psychological struggles of Inside Out’s adolescent hero, Riley. Though it sometimes veers close to being a spiritual successor to Christoper Nolan’s Memento, Finding Dory is again and again bogged down by hit-or-miss comedic gags and incessant action sequences, a problem that’s long plagued the finest of Pixar’s movies.
Missed opportunities aside, Finding Dory overcompensates for its flaws with an abundance of warmth, charm and cleverness. When all three qualities combine, as they do late in the film during an inspired scene that brims with adorable otters, it transcends any particular gripe. Those moments come often, but not often enough to elevate Finding Dory above Pixar’s second tier. Let’s be clear, though. Most filmmakers would kill to falter this well. And we, the audience, should count ourselves lucky to settle for such near-brilliance. Pixar may be the victim of its own artistic success, but moviegoers win when the bar can be set so high, even if it’s fully cleared only half the time.
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