Friday, July 22, 2016

Finding Dory - Movie Review



Who's In It?

Ellen DeGeneres, Ed O'NeillDiane Keaton, and Idris Elba


What's It About?

Dory has a dream about her lost family, and decides to drag Nemo and Marlin across the sea to find them.





Any Good?

I grew up on Finding Nemo and have seen it at least 20 times, so you can imagine I was pretty anti-sequel to one of the most important films of my childhood.

One of the things that swayed me was the return of the original voice actors - this is usually a good sign, and they didn't sound any less into it than for Nemo. One of the new highlights was Ed O'Neill as Hank the Septopus - he sounded even more exasperated and TV-style old man than on Modern Family.




This is very much a film of two halves - one in the water and one out. While out of the water does look good and has life in it, it has nothing on the sea of Nemo, but then again neither does the ocean unfortunately. The ocean itself only has about a quarter screen time, but it feels like a rushed checkup on familiar friends and tries to cram as many different water biome types in just not enough time.

Surprisingly for a sequel the story was great on it's own with vastly different locations and situations, as well as original characters. Some of the friends such as the sealions and Becky the bird are cleverly done, but my favourite has to be either Destiny the blind shark or the annoying clam (voiced by the director!).





A pleasant surprise from the land of cash-in sequels, Finding Dory felt like it had feeling put into it. The voice actors were brilliant and had not one phone-in, and for the first time in a long while I felt the heart of hand drawn animation styles in computer animation. 

Definitely go see it if you liked the original (who didn't???), and stay after the credits for a nice surprise.


Rating: 








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