Finding Dory - the Disney Pixar animated film

October 5, 2020

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Finding Dory (“Finding Dory” in the American original) is an animated film made in American 3D computer graphics in 2016, produced by Pixar Animation Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. The American film directed by Andrew Stanton and written by Stanton and Victoria Strouse, the film is the sequel to the film Finding Nemo 2003. The film tells the story of the forgetful little fish Dory, who travels in search of her parents.

The film premiered at the El Capitan Theater in Los Angeles on June 8, 2016 and was released in the United States on June 17, 2016, while in Italy it was released in cinemas on September 15 of the same year. Upon its release, the film was well received by critics and grossed over $ 1 billion worldwide, becoming the second Pixar film to gross $ 1 billion after. Toy Story 3 (2010), the third highest-grossing film of 2016 and the 22nd highest-grossing film of all time at the time of its theatrical run. The film set numerous box office records, including the largest opening of an animated film in North America and the highest-grossing animated film in North America.

The story of Finding Dory

Dory, one blue surgeon fish , is separated from her parents, Jenny and Charlie, since she was a child. As she grows up, Dory attempts to look for them, but gradually forgets them due to her short-term memory loss. In a flashback (from Finding Nemo ), joins Marlin - a clownfish in search of missing son Nemo - after accidentally bumping into him.

Dory remembers her parents

A year after meeting Marlin and Nemo, Dory lives with them on the reef. One day, Dory has a flashback and remembers her parents. She decides to look for them, but is hampered by her short-term memory problem. Suddenly he remembers that they lived at the "Jewel of Morro Bay, California" across the ocean when Nemo mentions this name.

The journey begins

Marlin and Nemo accompany Dory on her journey. With the help of Crush, their sea turtle friend, they ride the underwater current to California. Upon arrival, they explore a wreck full of lost cargo, where Dory accidentally awakens a giant squid, which chases them and nearly devours Nemo. They manage to trap the squid in a large container and Marlin scolds Dory for putting them in danger. Wounded in her feelings, Dory travels to the surface to seek help, but is captured by staff members of the Marine Life Institute.

Dory is captured

Dory and the Octopus Hank - Finding Dory

Dory is quarantined and cataloged. Here he meets a grumpy but peaceful seven-legged octopus named Hank. Dory's tag identifies her for relocation to an aquarium in Cleveland. Hank, who fears being released into the ocean, agrees to help Dory find her parents in exchange for her label. In one exhibit, Dory meets her childhood friend Destiny, a myopic whale shark, who used to communicate with Dory through pipes, and Bailey, a beluga dolphin, who mistakenly believes she has lost the ability to echolocate. Dory later has flashbacks from life with her parents and struggles to remember the details. Eventually she remembers how she was separated from her parents: one night she heard her mother cry, so she went to get a shell to cheer her up, but she was swept away by an undertow into the ocean.

Marlin and Nemo save Dory

The Sea Lions Fluke and Rudder - Finding Dory

Marlin and Nemo attempt to save Dory. With the help of two lazy California sea lions named Fluke and Rudder, they manage to break into the institute and find her in the pipe plant. Others blue surgeonfish , they tell them that Dory's parents fled the institution a long time ago to look for her and have never returned, leaving Dory to believe they are dead. Hank retrieves Dory from the tank, leaving Marlin and Nemo behind. He is then arrested by one of the employees who accidentally drops Dory down the drain, releasing her into the ocean. As he wanders aimlessly, he encounters a trail of shells. Dory remembers that when she was little, her parents had drawn a similar path to help her find her way home, so she follows him. At the end of the path, Dory finds an empty coral, with multiple trails of shells leading to it. As he turns to leave, his parents arrive. They tell her they spent years charting the path to follow, in the hope that she would eventually find them.

The liberation of the fish

Marlin, Nemo and Hank end up in the truck that takes various aquatic creatures to Cleveland. Destiny and Bailey escape from their exhibit to help Dory save them. Once aboard the truck, Dory convinces Hank to return to the sea with her, and together, they hijack the truck and drive it on busy highways, causing havoc and crashing it into the sea, where they release all the fish. Dory, along with her parents and new friends, returns to the reef with Marlin and Nemo.

The final scene

In a final scene of the film, Finding Nemo's gang of aquarium fish, still trapped in their plastic bags (now covered with algae), reach California a year after floating in the Pacific Ocean, where they are picked up. by staff members of the Marine Life Institute.

Finding Dory trailer

The production of Finding Dory

Before working on Finding Dory, Disney decided to make a sequel to Finding Nemo without Pixar's involvement, through Circle 7 Animation, a Disney studio announced in 2005 with plans to make sequels to the Pixar properties. . However, due to Disney's 2006 acquisition of Pixar, Circle 7 was closed by Disney without ever having produced a film. Although it never went into production, a script for the Circle 7 version was uploaded to the official Raindance Film Festival website. The story would involve Nemo's twin brother named Remy, then Marlin would be captured, and so Nemo, Remy and Dory would have to save him.

The first announcement of the sequel

In July 2012, it was reported that Andrew Stanton was developing a sequel to Finding Nemo, with Victoria Strouse writing the script and an expected 2016 release date.

In April 2013, Disney announced the sequel, Finding Dory, for November 25, 2015, confirming that DeGeneres and Brooks would reprise their roles as Dory and Marlin, respectively. After a long campaign for a sequel to The Ellen DeGeneres Show, DeGeneres said: I've been waiting for this day for a long, long, long, long, long, long time. I'm not angry, it took so long. I know the people at Pixar were busy making Toy Story. But it was worth it. The script is fantastic. And he's got everything I loved about the first one: he's got a lot of heart, he's really funny, and the best part is he has a lot more Dory.

Stanton's interview

The turtles, Nemo and Dory - Finding Dory

In a 2016 interview Stanton stated how the story of the film was born; “I don't watch my films that often after they are finished, because I have to watch them many times before they come out. So, around 2010, when we were getting Finding Nemo, ready for the 10-year re-release in 3D, it was interesting to watch it again after all that time. Something got stuck in the back of my brain and it started to get boring. I started thinking about how easily Dory could get lost and not find Marlin and Nemo. It was basically in the same state it was in when Marlin found it. I didn't know where it came from. I knew she had spent most of her youth wandering the ocean alone and I wanted to know how she could find her new family if she ever got lost again. It's almost like my parenting side is worried.

The difficulty of the script

He pointed to a difficult challenge to write a story with Dory's memory loss: "You don't realize until you sit down to write a character who can't remember things, how integral memory is in everything that we do, and this is what creates a narrative that people can follow. When a main character cannot reflect on himself and cannot tell a story, that character is very difficult to design because he cannot really guide the story. To get her to be able to lead and get an audience to be able to trust her was the hardest thing to do ”.

The fictional Marine Life Institute extensively depicted in the film is based on the production team's research trips to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Marine Mammal Center and Vancouver Aquarium.

The decision of the film's ending

The film's ending was revised after Pixar executives watched Blackfish, a 2013 documentary film that focuses on the dangers of keeping orcas in captivity. Initially, some of the characters were supposed to end up in a SeaWorld-like marine park, but the overhaul gave them a chance to leave. On September 18, 2013, it was announced that the film would be postponed to release on June 17, 2016. Pixar's Arlo (The Good Dinosaur) Journey has been moved to November 25, 2015, to allow more time for film production. .

Angus MacLane was one of the first people Stanton revealed his idea for the sequel to. Together, with Bob Peterson, they discussed several ideas for places Dory would visit on her journey: one of these ideas was the touch pool sequence. Later, during Brave's closing party (2012), Stanton invited Angus to join him in his first co-director role. Stanton described Angus' role as a "jack of all trades", particularly using his experience in animation and story, as well as in production, having created a few short films himself.

In August 2015, at Disney's D23 Expo, it was announced that Hayden Rolence would be voicing Nemo, replacing Alexander Gould from the first film, whose voice had deepened since she became an adult (Gould instead voiced a minor character in the first film. sequel). At D23, they also announced that Ed O'Neill would be Hank's voice.

To make the light more realistic, the RenderMan software has been completely redesigned, its biggest change in 25 years.

The soundtrack

The soundtrack of the film titled Finding Dory was composed by Thomas Newman and released on June 17, 2016. Louis Armstrong's version of "What a Wonderful World" plays during the scene where the fish are released in the ocean, while the truck that Dory and Hank are driving crashes into the water. On May 20, 2016, Sia performed a cover of Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable" on The Ellen DeGeneres Show following the announcement that it would be included in the film.

Earnings from Finding Dory

Finding Dory grossed $ 486,3 million in the United States and Canada and $ 542,3 million in other countries for a worldwide total of $ 1,029 billion, against a budget of $ 200 million. It had a worldwide opening of $ 185,7 million, which is the sixth largest of all time for an animated film, behind Frozen II (358,5 million), The Lion King ($ 246 million), Toy Story 4 ($ 244,5 million), The Incredibles 2 ($ 235,8 million) and Ice Age 3 ($ 218,4 million) and an IMAX global opening of $ 6,4 million. On August 16 it became the fourth film of 2016 to earn $ 900 million in ticket sales and on October 9, its seventeenth weekend, it crossed the $ 2016 billion mark, becoming the third film of 3 after Capitain America: Civil War. and Zootropolis to reach that milestone, the second Pixar film (after Toy Story 3), the fifth animated film (after Toy Story XNUMX, Frozen, Minions and Zootropolis), the twelfth Disney film (fourth Disney animated film) and the twentieth-seventh film ever in the history of cinema.

Earnings around the world

Worldwide, it is the third highest-grossing film of 2016 (behind Civil War and Rogue One), the highest-grossing animated film of 2016, the fourth highest-grossing Pixar film ever (behind The Incredibles 2, Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4), the ninth highest-grossing animated film of all time (behind the 2019 version of The Lion King, Frozen II, Frozen, Incredibles 2, Minions, Toy Story 3, Toy Story 4 and Despicable Me 3), and the 41st highest-grossing film of all time. Deadline Hollywood calculated that the film's net profit was $ 296,6 million, taking into account all expenses and revenues for the film, making it the fourth most profitable release of 2016.

Criticism of the film

On the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, Finding Dory has an approval rating of 94% based on 323 reviews and an average rating of 7,65 / 10. The website's critical consensus reads: “Funny, touching and inspiring , Finding Dory offers a wonderfully animated adventure that adds another fun chapter to the classic story of its predecessor ”. On Metacritic, the film has a score of 77 out of 100, based on 48 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore rated the film an average “A” on a scale of A + to F, while PostTrak viewers reported gave it an overall positive score of 91% and a “final recommendation” of 81%.

The comments on the film

Mike Ryan of Uproxx wrote, “I never thought I'd want a sequel to Finding Nemo, but here we are and I'm pretty happy it exists. And, for me, it was a more emotional experience than the first film. Finding Dory… it made me cry. AO Scott of the New York Times said that while the film lacks "dazzling originality", it still has "warmth, charm and good humor." In his review for Variety, Owen Gleiberman wrote, “It's a film that's brimming with laughter (most of them good, some of them picky) and tears (all earned), secondary characters that are meant to kill us (and most of all do) with their irascible sharp tongues and dizzying flights of physical comedy “. Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal said "Finding Dory can be touching, sweet and tender, but it is compulsively, absurdly and firmly fun." Rolling Stone's Peter Travers gave the film three and a half stars out of four and said the film "brims with humor, heart and animation miracles," despite missing "

Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: "Her heroine may suffer from short-term memory loss, but viewers with any memory will realize that Finding Dory is rather below her wonderful progenitor." Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan said that, "As the 13-year gap between" Nemo "and" Dory "indicates, this was not a concept that screamed to be done."

Conservationists have warned that, just like Finding Nemo, the film could lead uninformed customers to purchase the blue surgeonfish, Dory's species, for home aquariums. These fish cannot be bred in captivity and must be caught in the wild and display razor-sharp spines on either side of their tail that can inflict formidable wounds.

Another possible sequel

In June 2016, director Andrew Stanton talked about the possibility of a sequel, saying he would never rule it out due to the introduction of new characters, citing films from Toy Story as guides on expanding a world through sequels.

Technical data

Original title Finding Dory
Country United States of America
Year 2016
Duration 97 minutes
Gender animation, adventure, comedy
Regia Andrew Stanton, Angus MacLane (co-director)
Subject Andrew Stanton
Film script Andrew StantonVictoria Strouse
Producer Lindsey Collins
Production house Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar Animation Studios
Music Thomas Newman
Art director Don Shank

Original voice actors and characters

Ellen DeGeneres: Dory
Albert Brooks: Marlin
Hayden Rollence: Nemo
Ed O'Neill: Hank
Kaitlin Olson: Destiny
Ty Burrell: Bailey
Diane Keaton: Jenny
Eugene Levi: Charlie

Italian voice actors and characters

Carla Signoris: Dory
Luca Zingaretti: Marlin
Gabriel Meoni: Nemo
Ugo Maria Morosi: Hank
Frances Manicone: Destiny
Ambrose Columbus: Bailey
Melina Hammer: Jenny
Charles Valli: Charlie