Cartoon Corner- Finding Dory

Originally posted at the DL July 2016

Just keep swimming



Finding Nemo isn't a movie I ever quite clicked with.  Like basically every Pixar movie prior to Incredibles it was somewhat obviously a kid-oriented movie, I saw it as an adult (hell, for context, I didn't watch Finding Nemo until the blu-ray release), and just generally it was a solid movie without being spectacular about anything.  Or I remember it that way, and I neglected to make time to watch it before theater time because CK is a lazy fuck if y'all haven't noticed.

And that ended up not being the case for Finding Dory.  And I think to delve into how that works I have to do things a bit different than usual and get sorta personal.

So, my sister has moderate-to-severe autism.  I don’t really know the precise sort she has, because she was diagnosed at age three nearly 30 years ago.  One did not really diagnose less severe autism-spectrum disorders in the late 80s (sidebar: this is why the rate of autism rises through the years.  It’s not becoming more common by any evidence we can find, we’re just actually diagnosing the cases that were always there more often).  I’ve met autistics who are more severe, but it’s still an immediately apparent developmental disorder which, in all likelihood, will prevent her from living or working unsupervised her entire life.

Now, this is hardly a 1:1 analogue of course.  Dory has a lot more means to develop coping mechanisms because society (even fictional talking fish society) simply deals better with extroversion than introversion.  But watching the inescapable knowledge that your child will probably never be able to take care of themselves gnaw at the back of someone’s brain?  Yeah that’s most of my family for most of my life.  Not necessarily tears in the night I guess, that’s very movie-y, but hushed conversations, trying any fool idea that passes that could help, the need to create some fragile veil of normalcy at any turn?  Very well acquainted.

There’s an inversion of these moments as well, where Dory is crushed under a sense of guilt for causing her parents heartache.  And as the oldest child of parents in a particularly contentious marriage until they finally split some 16 years later, that’s certainly something I felt no few number of times as a kid.

So somehow a movie that came out when I was 20 that I didn’t watch until I was nearly 30… spoke very directly to my childhood and I spent several long segments of it tearing up and it was fuckin’ weird.

The odd thing is the rest of the movie shows some of the detrimental effects of being a sequel.  Some references there for their own sake, the other two main characters have to be there but their subplot isn’t anything to write home about (although!  They do introduce the phrase “what would Dory do” and that’s amazing), and I don’t know that the new supporting cast did too much for me?  But the big moments were enormous even if the small moments weren’t always up to the task of holding them up fully.

Rating- 9/10.  Dory herself is an utter joy (another great thing, watching her logic her way to concluding things she can’t remember) and it’d be dishonest of me to rate the movie much lower after talking about spending chunks of it teary eyed, even if my gut reaction is more of an 8 on the overall strength of the film.