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This article was published 17/11/2016 (3546 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Finding Dory

In the 2003 Pixar hit Finding Nemo, the character of the forgetful blue tang Dory, sublimely voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, was presumably a product of simple fish-tank observation.

For Dory, attention is a fleeting thing. She may be listening to you one minute. But if something shiny floats by, she’s gone.

In the long-awaited sequel to Nemo, Dory is front and centre, living happily, if distractedly, under the watchful eye of the paternal clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) until she experiences a startling memory of her own caring parents (voiced by Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy).

Not one for sober second thought, Dory catches a current to the other side of the ocean to track her family, with Marlin and his son Nemo in hot pursuit.

The key to the mystery of Dory’s origins lie in a Sea World-like ocean park, where Dory meets a grumpy octopus named Hank (Ed O’Neill) — though Hank’s missing tentacle technically makes him a “septopus.”

Whatever trauma he suffered, Hank doesn’t want to go back to the ocean; he has his heart set on a nice quiet aquarium in Cleveland. To ensure an uneventful future, he agrees to help Dory — no small advantage, since Hank can leave the water for long periods of time and has a chameleon-like ability to blend in with his surroundings. (As a work of animation, Hank is an extraordinary achievement, somewhat belied by O’Neill’s quotidian, everyman voice.) Also aiding Dory: a nearsighted whale shark named Destiny (Kaitlin Olson) and Bailey (Ty Burrell), a beluga struggling to overcome a faulty radar.

At the same time, Marlin and Nemo’s pursuit yields a separate adventure that sees the clownfish duo gaining intelligence from a couple of helpful sea lions (voiced by Idris Elba and Dominic West).

As in Finding Nemo, the undersea animation is gorgeous and the humour is kid-friendly with an undercurrent of adult smarts. (Brooks’s Marlin, for example, for all his compassion, is a classic kvetcher. A gag involving Sigourney Weaver’s voice is worthy of a New Yorker cartoon.)

But that doesn’t hide the fact the film’s plot has a decided been-there-swum-that familiarity.

To make up for it, director Andrew Stanton, who also wrote the screenplay, sometimes overcompensates by tipping the fish scales into melodrama, turning Dory’s state of scatterbrains into full-blown movie-of-the-week malady.

For the most part, however, Stanton’s good intentions don’t mean the movie isn’t a good time. And you’ve got to give points to any movie about ocean dwellers that still manages to pull off a car chase. 1/2

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing