Pixar has had an uneven road over the course of the last few years. Post Toy Story 3, the company has gone through heights as high as this year’s Inside Out and lows as deep in the dirt as Cars 2. However, with the critical, box office and audience success of the former, Pixar has earned enough good will for us to expect that its attempts to sequelize their most beloved efforts won’t be as horrendous as the latter. Next summer will see the release of Finding Dory, the sequel to the company’s much beloved Finding Nemo that will be released 13 years after the original.However, unlike Toy Story 3, this sequel will not be taking place over a decade after the previous adventure, probably for obvious reasons that consider the life span of fish.
Instead, it’s mere months after the adventure to “P Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney” and Dory (voiced once again by Ellen DeGeneres) is living right next coral to Marlin (voiced by Albert Brooks) and Nemo (Hayden Rolence). While “sleep swimming”, Dory does something no one expects; she remembers something. Specifically, something from her childhood about her parents. Recalling “the jewel of Monterey, California”, Dory, Marlon and Nemo decide to journey across the world to find out about Dory’s past with a whale (voiced by Ty Burrell) and an octopus (voiced by Ed O’Neill) as their guides. The trailer, which was released via The Ellen Show‘s YouTube channel, can be seen below:
Now admittedly, there’s not a huge amount to go on from this trailer. We only seem to get an inciting incident for Dory to search for her past. It’s not a bad idea for sequel, in as much as it turns the tables on Dory and Marlin’s roles in the first film. Yet, I’m genuinely curious as to where the story will actually go and what it could ultimately lead to for these characters. I could easily see Marlin and Nemo getting short shifted to near cameo status in the same way Owen Wilson’s Lightning McQueen was in the previously mentioned Cars 2, only… you know… with characters we care about. A sequel to Finding Nemo really isn’t warranted; that film is a perfectly self contained story that still holds up in terms of animation, comedy and heart. Another adventure could potentially deplete the magic, especially when giving a supporting character like Dory the spotlight. Maybe part of that suspicion comes from a personal disinterest in DeGeneres’ work outside of Nemo, but I could easily see the same joke of Dory’s lacking memory getting old if the filmmakers rely on it far more than the previous film did. Still, we’ll have to see if this and Thanksgiving’s The Good Dinosaur can keep up the potential comeback for the once flawless animation studio.
Finding Dory opens June 17th 2016.
