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Finding Dory is a 2016 American computer-animated adventure film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. Directed by Andrew Stanton and written by Stanton and Victoria Strouse, the film is a sequel to Finding Nemo (2003) and features the returning voices of Ellen DeGeneres and Albert Brooks, with Hayden Rolence (replacing Alexander Gould), Ed O'Neill, Kaitlin Olson, Ty Burrell, Diane Keaton, and Eugene Levy joining the cast. The film focuses on the amnesiac fish Dory, who journeys to be reunited with her parents.
Finding Dory premiered at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles on June 8, 2016, and was released in the United States on June 17, 2016. It was well-received by critics, garnering praise for its animation, emotional weight, voice acting, and humor. The film grossed over $1 billion worldwide, becoming the second Pixar film to gross $1 billion after Toy Story 3 (2010) and the third highest-grossing film of 2016. It set numerous box office records, including the biggest opening for an animated film in North America, and the highest-grossing animated film in North America.
Plot
Dory, the regal blue tang, gets separated from her parents, Jenny and Charlie, as a child. As she grows up, Dory attempts to search for them, but gradually forgets them due to her short-term memory loss. Later, she joins Marlin the clownfish, looking for Nemo.
One year after meeting Marlin and Nemo, Dory is living with them on their reef. One day, Dory has a flashback and remembers her parents. She decides to look for them, but her memory problem is an obstacle. She suddenly remembers that they lived at the "Jewel of Morro Bay, California" across the ocean when Nemo mentions the name.
Marlin and Nemo accompany Dory on her journey. With the help of Crush, their sea turtle friend, they ride the California Current to California. Upon arrival, they explore a shipwreck full of lost cargo, where Dory accidentally awakens a giant Humboldt squid, who pursues them and almost devours Nemo. They manage to trap the squid in a large shipping container, and Marlin berates Dory for endangering them. Her feelings hurt, Dory travels to the surface to seek help where she is captured by staff members from the trio's nearby destination, the Marine Life Institute.
Dory is placed in quarantine and tagged. There she meets a grouchy but well-meaning seven-legged octopus named Hank. Dory's tag marks her for transfer to an aquarium in Cleveland. Hank, who fears being released back into the ocean, agrees to help Dory find her parents in exchange for her tag. In one exhibit, Dory encounters her childhood friend Destiny, a nearsighted whale shark, who used to communicate with Dory through pipes, and Bailey, a beluga whale, who mistakenly believes he has lost his ability to echolocate. Dory subsequently has flashbacks of life with her parents and struggles to recall details. She finally remembers how she was separated from her parents: she overheard her mother crying one night, left to retrieve a shell to cheer her up, and was pulled away by an undertow current out into the ocean.
Marlin and Nemo attempt to rescue Dory. With the help of two lazy California sea lions named Fluke and Rudder and a common loon named Becky, they manage to get into the institute and find her in the pipe system. Other blue tangs tell them that Dory's parents escaped from the institute a long time ago to search for her and never came back, leaving Dory to believe that they have died. Hank retrieves Dory from the tank, accidentally leaving Marlin and Nemo behind. He is then apprehended by one of the employees and unintentionally drops Dory into the drain, flushing her out to the ocean. While wandering aimlessly, she comes across a trail of shells; remembering that when she was young, her parents had set out a similar trail to help her find her way back home, she follows it. At the end of the trail, Dory finds an empty brain coral with multiple shell trails leading to it. As she turns to leave, her parents arrive. They tell her they spent years laying down the trails for her to follow in the hopes that she would eventually find them.
Marlin, Nemo, and Hank end up in the truck taking various aquatic creatures to Cleveland. Destiny and Bailey escape from their exhibit to help Dory rescue them. Once onboard the truck, Dory persuades Hank to return to the sea with her, and together, they hijack the truck and drive it over busy highways, creating havoc, before crashing it into the sea, freeing all the fish. Dory, along with her parents and new friends, returns to the reef with Marlin and Nemo.
In a post-credits scene, the Tank Gang (from Finding Nemo), still trapped inside their (now covered in algae) plastic bags, reach California one year after floating across the Pacific Ocean, where they are picked up by staff members from the Marine Life Institute.
Production
Prior to work on Finding Dory, Disney had planned to make a Finding Nemo sequel without Pixar's involvement, through Circle 7 Animation, a studio Disney announced in 2005 with the intention to make sequels to Pixar properties. However, due to the 2006 acquisition of Pixar by Disney, Circle 7 was shut down 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. It would have involved Nemo's long lost twin brother named Remy, then Marlin gets captured so it is up to Nemo, Remy, and Dory to save him.
Director Andrew Stanton at the 2016 Annecy International Animated Film Festival
In July 2012, it was reported that Andrew Stanton was developing a sequel to Finding Nemo, with Victoria Strouse writing the script and a release date scheduled for 2016. However, the same day the news of a potential sequel broke, Stanton posted a message on his personal Twitter calling into question the accuracy of these reports. The message said, "Didn't you all learn from Chicken Little? Everyone calm down. Don't believe everything you read. Nothing to see here now. #skyisnotfalling." According to a report by The Hollywood Reporter published in August 2012, Ellen DeGeneres was in negotiations to reprise her role of Dory. In September 2012, it was confirmed by Stanton, saying: "What was immediately on the list was writing a second Carter movie. When that went away, everything slid up. I know I'll be accused by more sarcastic people that it's a reaction to Carter not doing well, but only in its timing, but not in its conceit." In February 2013, it was confirmed by the press that Albert Brooks would reprise the role of Marlin in the sequel.
In April 2013, Disney announced the sequel, Finding Dory, for November 25, 2015, confirming that DeGeneres and Brooks would be reprising their roles as Dory and Marlin, respectively. Following a long campaign for a sequel on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, DeGeneres stated:
I have waited for this day for a long, long, long, long, long, long time. I'm not mad it took this long. I know the people at Pixar were busy creating Toy Story 16. But the time they took was worth it. The script is fantastic. And it has everything I loved about the first one: It's got a lot of heart, it's really funny, and the best part is—it's got a lot more Dory.
In a July 2013 interview with Los Angeles Times, Stanton spoke of the sequel's origin: "There was polite inquiry from Disney [about a Finding Nemo sequel]. I was always 'No sequels, no sequels.' But I had to get on board from a VP standpoint. [Sequels] are part of the necessity of our staying afloat, but we don't want to have to go there for those reasons. We want to go there creatively, so we said [to Disney], 'Can you give us the timeline about when we release them? Because we'd like to release something we actually want to make, and we might not come up with it the year you want it.'"
In a 2016 interview, Stanton stated how the film's story came to be; "I don't watch my films that often after they're done because I have to watch them so many times before they come out. So about 2010 when we were getting Finding Nemo ready for the 10-year re-release in 3D, it was interesting to watch again after all that time. Something kind of got lodged in the back of my brain and started to sort of stew. I started to think about how easily Dory could get lost and not find Marlin and Nemo again. She basically was in the same state that she was when Marlin found her. I didn't know where she was from. I knew that she had spent most of her youth wandering the ocean alone, and I wanted to know that she could find her new family, if she ever got lost again. It's almost like the parental side of me was worried." Stanton additionally stated: "I knew if I ever said Finding Dory or mentioned a sequel to Finding Nemo out loud, I'd be done, [T]here would be no way I'd be able to put that horse back in the barn. So I kept it very quiet until I knew I had a story that I thought would hold, and that was in early 2012. So I pitched it to John Lasseter and he was all into it. Then I got a writer, and once we had a treatment that we kind of liked, I felt comfortable calling Ellen."
Co-director Angus MacLane at a Finding Dory premiere
Stanton selected Victoria Strouse to write the screenplay. She later said, "It was always collaborative with Andrew, but really the screenwriting was me. Of course, Andrew would do passes, and he and I would brainstorm a lot together and then we would bring it to the group of story artists. People would weigh in and share ideas." She pointed to Dory's forgetfulness as a challenge when writing the script, adding, "You don't realize until you sit down to write a character who can't remember things how integral memory is to absolutely everything we do, and that's what creates a narrative that people can follow. When a main character can't self-reflect and can't tell a story, that character is very difficult to design because she can't really lead. To get her to be able to lead and to get an audience to be able to trust her was the hardest thing to do."
The fictional Marine Life Institute depicted extensively in the film is based on the production team's research trips to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Marine Mammal Center and the Vancouver Aquarium.
The film's ending was revised after Pixar executives viewed Blackfish, a 2013 documentary film which focuses on the dangers of keeping orca whales in captivity. Initially, some of the characters were to end up in a SeaWorld-like marine park, but the revision gave them an option to leave. In September 2013, the film was pushed back to June 17, 2016, as The Good Dinosaur was scheduled for the original date instead.
Angus MacLane was one of the first people to whom Stanton revealed his idea for the sequel. Together, with Bob Peterson, they discussed about different ideas for places Dory would visit during her journey — one of those ideas was the touch pool sequence. Later, during the Brave (2012) wrap party, Stanton invited Angus to join him in his first co-directing duty. Stanton described Angus' role as a "jack of all trades", particularly utilizing 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 voice Nemo, replacing Alexander Gould from the first film, whose voice had deepened since reaching adulthood (Gould voiced a minor character in the sequel instead). At the D23 expo they also announced that Ed O'Neill would be the voice of Hank.
(Wikipedia)