Like many Americans, I spent a couple of hours in the theater this past weekend catching up with Dory, Marlin, and Nemo.  And by catching up with, I mean swimming far into the murky existential depths of the children’s movie that is Finding Dory.

Confession: I had so much exposure to Finding Nemo when it first came out on DVD that anything that made it special was truly lost on me.  So going into Finding Dory, I was simply hoping for a decent story with some great animation.  I went in assuming that, as children’s fare, the movie would be easy and breezy.  It really wasn’t, which is part of what K. Austin Collins makes note of early in his reflection on the movie at The Ringer:

Surprisingly and not, Finding Dory gets dark. Quite dark, when you think about it, but you have to look beyond the fabricated whimsy of the story toward all the tragic weirdness hovering just outside of it. You have to notice the surroundings: a sunken freighter, with its steel cargo containers crumpled along the seafloor like a kingdom of forgotten junk and the plastic soda rings that briefly ensnare an always-unsuspecting, freckle-faced Dory. You have to consider where Dory comes from: a marine life institute where (the voice of Sigourney Weaver tells us) scientists believe in the three R’s: “rescue, rehabilitation, and release.” Sounds dreamy — until an octopus named Hank (Ed O’Neill) explains he’s missing a tentacle thanks to the throngs of grabby children at said institute, making him, as Dory helpfully points out, a septopus, not an octopus. A septopus with toddler-induced post-traumatic stress disorder.

It’s insightful, darkly funny stuff, this trove of secondary details, all of it hinting at a weirder world of humans and other forces that exceed the eventual story’s needs.

Finding Dory is a great example, at least to me, of a movie that can be safely dangerous (as opposed to dangerously safe).  Dory’s memory issue make the journey that more uncertain.  Her slowly returning memories make the stakes that much higher.  When she ultimately hits “rock bottom,” she stays there for longer than expected.  And because of the nature of the character, achieving the intended goal is never the end of the adventure.

In his Ringer article, Collins asserts that it’s Dory’s “safe bet” status that should’ve allowed the movie to go weird places. For him, the movie might be an example of the dangerously safe.  That makes more sense when Collins reminds us of Dory‘s director’s previous work as writer and/or director on Wall-E, A Bug’s Life, and the Toy Story movies (which had moments very dark and very weird).

Too often, the utopias Pixar imagines for children are so much duller, morally and aesthetically, than the worlds those kids already live in. The pleasure of Finding Dory, for an adult, is its sense of the dangerous wonder of the wider world, as scary as it is irresistible . . .

The central irony of Finding Dory is that Dory is a risk-taker trapped in a movie that, for all its likability, won’t join her on whimsical leaps.

I remember hearing (perhaps reading) somewhere last week that Finding Dory really is the missing piece of the Finding Nemo story, that the idea of Dory finding her home was something that begged for resolution. I’m not sure that I would’ve agreed prior to seeing the sequel. I’m glad they told the story, though.  And I’m kind of glad that it’s dark and more serious than I expected (and much more subtle than a gang of toys trapped in an incinerator).  I also get Collins’ point. Perhaps, in that way, Dory is a missed opportunity.  We’ll see if Pixar dips its toes in the same water for a third time to meet that challenge.

You can read the whole Ringer article about Finding Dory here.

(image from wallpapershome.com)