The last thing Andrew Stanton ever considered was a sequel to “Finding Nemo,” Pixar’s most successful original story to date. But in the midst of making the “John Carter of Mars” misfire in 2010, he couldn’t get Dory off his mind. Now, 13 years later, he’s solved the mystery of her short-term memory loss while crafting yet another Pixar mid-life crisis movie about self-reflection that’s very personal for him.
“Finding Dory” picks up six months after ‘Nemo’: Dory’s happy with her new family, but after a childhood memory is triggered, she’s obsessed with finding her parents (voiced by Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy) and ends up at the California Marine Biology Institute— filled with glass and water and very confining —where Dory was born and raised. There she bonds with a septopus named Hank (Ed O’Neill), who’s missing a tentacle, a near-sighted whale shark named Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a beluga named Bailey (Ty Burrell) and a pair of sea lions, Rudder (Dominic West) and Fluke (Idris Elba).
But for Stanton, the biggest challenge was wrapping his head around Dory, who went from endearing sidekick to conflicted protagonist. “She’s driven by an internal fear of being alone and she deserves to not be driven by fear anymore and to embrace that,” he said. “And to know that that’s her superpower, not her weakness. But it took about two years to realize that self-reflection is necessary to track growth in a main character. To be able to go, ‘I felt that long ago and now I feel differently and to be able to state that.’ She can’t. She’s always had an emotional memory in our mind. It was sort of this weird rule for ourselves to track her in the first movie.”
But self-awareness doesn’t come easily for a character with short-term memory loss, and that’s where Hank comes in. He’s able to ground her even though he has lost his sense of humor during his confinement. That’s where the Pixar buddy comedy dynamic kicks in.
“How can you have short-term memory loss and not have some trauma? The resonance of ‘Finding Nemo’ after 10 years is so great that we can’t address this simply: We have to really indulge. And it ended up being a really nice reminder, I think, of how really dark the first movie is. It’s a dramatic movie with a lot of funny things in it.”
And one Dory’s great characteristics is that she’s surrounded by people with physical and emotional problems, but she accepts them unconditionally and apologizes for her short-term memory loss. She’s a born caretaker, according to Stanton.
As for DeGeneres, Stanton said that he took a chance on the actress for “Nemo” (the role was conceived for her). But she owns Dory in ways he never anticipated “We did our first session with Ellen and there’s this X factor with her: charm, appeal, sophistication and a base of high intelligence that even I fell victim to underestimating until I heard these lines.
“Finding Dory” opens on June 17.
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