One of the highlights of Finding Nemo was Nemo’s comically elaborate escape from an aquarium in a dentist’s office. Finding Dory, which centers on Nemo’s forgetful friend Dory (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres) and her attempt to reunite with her parents at a marine research institute, plays like a feature-length version of that sequence. Our aquatic heroes flip and flop their way from ocean to outdoor exhibit to warehouse to indoor aquarium via buckets, strollers, goofy birds and the help of a camouflaging octopus named Hank (Ed O’Neill). It’s all inventive, amusing and eventually exhausting. A poignant, opening flashback imagines the challenges of raising a forgetful child, but once the story proper gets underway there are few pauses in the action for contemplation. Instead, the absurdities of Dory’s adventure keep getting ratcheted up, until we reach an over-the-top climax that abandons any semblance of logic (and even in animation, the best stunts are those somewhat tethered to logic). Still, there is a lot of the same humor here that drove the original — director Andrew Stanton returns, aided by co-director Angus MacLane — including a comic skepticism about the supposed sweetness of children. The highlight in Finding Dory, in fact, might be Dory and Hank navigating the horrors of a “touch pool.” You have to give some credit to a family movie that depicts kids as grubby, grasping little monsters.
