And it’s here that the film truly sparks to life, swapping its gentle expository opening scenes for a smart journey into Dory’s faltering mind - like a maritime take on Memento - that also doubles as a thrilling headlong dive into a micro community that’s as vividly drawn as Sunnyside Daycare in Toy Story 3 or, for that matter, the dentist’s office in Finding Nemo.

Suffice to say, their plan to find Dory’s mum and dad (expertly voiced by Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy, respectively) does not go smoothly. Repaying the faith shown by Dory in that first ocean-spanning adventure, her new friends join her and - by way of an encounter with a furious giant squid - find themselves at Californian aquarium and conservation centre the Marine Life Institute. First, he appeared as Chief Bogo, a no-nonsense cape buffalo and chief of police in Disneys Zootopia. This early revelation - Dory’s back story is that she basically hasn’t got one - is a potent reminder that Andrew Stanton (the returning Finding Nemo writer-director who also gave us WALL-E’s lonely robot in a trash-piled dystopia) is unafraid to add tragic undercurrents to something that’s notionally a family film.įlash forward a year and, after the events of Finding Nemo, Dory has formed a happy family of sorts with Marlin and his son (Hayden Rolence) until some flashbacks to fragmented childhood memories have her seeking a parental reunion of her own. Less of an easter egg, and more of a moment in history that Disney fans wont want to miss, since Finding Dory marks the third time in just one year that Idris Elba voiced a large, imposing character in a Disney film. After Piper, a nicely paired short about a plucky seabird, we meet Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) as a cute (but still troublingly forgetful) kid who mysteriously loses her parents then wanders the ocean for years, trying to plug the holes in her sieve-like brain until she crashes into a panicked clownfish called Marlin (Albert Brooks). It helps that, like Pixar’s pitches, there’s an elegant simplicity to the way the plot turns the first film on its head.

Disney finding dory full movie