+ Best Sequel of the Year + Best Family Movie of the Year + Best Blockbuster of the Year
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| The exciting, wildly invitational poster for Andrew Stanton and Angus MacLane's Finding Dory |
Finding Dory is the sequel to masterpiece Finding Nemo (2003). It is written by returning Massachusetts-born master co-writer/co-director Andrew Stanton (A Bug's Life (1998)) and Victoria Strouse (New Best Friend (2002)), and directed by Stanton and Angus MacLane (Burn-E (2008), short).
After getting Nemo back to his father Marlin, blue amnesiac fish Dory begins to recollect her own parents, whom she herself got lost from years ago. Without the initial assistance of Nemo and Marlin, she heads out on a new quest to find them.
The scope of the adventure can't but feel smaller and less novel here than in the first film, which went through several incredible ocean sequences before ending in a fantastic section set in a tank in a dentist's office in Sydney, Australia. The storytellers make an auspicious and smart turn in Finding Dory by getting the story pretty quickly out of the familiar endlessness of oceans and setting it firmly within a much smaller setting, a public aquarium in California.
Stanton and Co. manage to make another fun-filled adventure work here. Any fan of Ellen DeGeneres (Ellen (1994-98)) will enjoy her empathetic, excellent voicing as Dory, a fish whose forgetfulness would likely be annoying if performed by a less endearing actor. Ed O'Neill (Modern Family (2009-16)) is good as the voice of the biggest new character, disheartened octopus Hank, and other fun star turns, of which there are too many to notice and fully appreciate in just one viewing, include Idris Elba (The Jungle Book (2016)) and Dominic West (Pride (2014)) as two sea lions. Two more lovable characters are the whale shark and the beluga whale that Dory befriends in the aquarium.
The animation is great as expected, and the 3D dimension never gets the driver's seat: Story is king, which is just as it should be. My only negative note on the animation is the design of Dory as a baby fish, in which she has grotesquely oversized eyes. Anyone with some knowledge of character animation knows the importance and power of characters' eyes, which is why they are usually oversized, but this level of oversizing seems unnecessary overkill; - plus we know that Pixar's skilled animators can make us feel for characters even if they have less oversized eyes. So a small burp to that.
There's some darkness before the funny and awesome conclusion of the over-all wonderful film, a solid sequel that doesn't lessen the strength of the original but also never comes near to it.
The film is accompanied by Alan Barillaro's short Piper, his first effort as writer-director, a sweet, incredibly vividly animated story of a little bird's learning to find its own food.
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Watch an official trailer for the film here
Cost: 200 mil. $
Box office: 930.9 mil. $ and counting
= Big hit
[Finding Dory premiered June 8 (El Capitan Theatre, Hollywood) and runs 97 minutes. Disney initially planned to make a sequel without the involvement of Pixar, after their purchase of the company, at their Circle 7 Animation, - which however never produced any films before it was closed again in 2006. Stanton was not interested in a sequel for many years, but after his mega-flop John Carter (2012), he developed a script with Strouse and got the very enthusiastic DeGeneres involved. Documentary Blackfish (2013) resulted in some changes to the script and its SeaWorld-like setting. The film opened #1 to a 135 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it dropped pretty slowly week-to-week, keeping in first place for 4 weeks before dropping to #3, then #4 and then out of the top 5. It has so far grossed 479.7 mil. $ in North America. It is the 4th highest-grossing movie worldwide of the year at the moment, and in North America, it is the highest-grossing film of the year and the highest-grossing animated movie of all time. It has yet to open in Italy, Austria and Germany and so is likely to cross the 1 bil. $ mark before finishing theatrically. Finding Dory is certified fresh at 94 % with a 7.7 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Finding Dory?
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