Finding Dory
Much as I loved Travis Fimmel as Ragnar Lothbrok in TV’s Vikings (it was quite a career jump, wasn’t it, for a bloke to be modelling underpants one day and slaughtering Saxons the next), I had been looking forward to my next colonoscopy with more enthusiasm than I held for having to sit through Warcraft (49 dead in Orlando and still graphic violence is presented as an entertainment). Fortunately there was this benign but innocuous cartoon to fall back on. Obviously, it’s a sequel to the wildly overrated Finding Nemo (2003 – what took them so long, I wonder?) and is equally as flaccid. Voiced with an over-emphasis on cuteness by Ellen DeGeneres, Dory is a blue tang fish who suffers from short-term memory loss. She gets separated from her parents and sets off like Ulysses in search of them. Helping Dory on her epic quest is an octopus called Hank (Ed O’Neill) and, from the earlier movie, Nemo and Marlin (Hayden Rolence and Albert Brooks). Dory’s adventures are not exactly riveting and for mums and dads there is little to savour in what is a very G-rated exercise. Anything that opens kids’ eyes, however, to the wonders of the ocean can’t be bad – perhaps somebody could get the odious Greg Hunt to attend a screening – but the insistent mushiness of the family is nauseating in the extreme. Possibly because the action takes place as much out of the water as it does on land, the final act, when Dory liberates his mum and dad from a marine park, is cleverly conceived, fast paced and energetic. The animation throughout is cheery and colourful but soporific, and there is little indication that, out there in the briny, fish actually eat other fish – the studio’s attitude to the realities of nature might change after that alligator ate the two-year old at Disneyworld. Boring for the most part, it’s the sort of movie that you’d get a grown-up child to take the little’uns to as a punishment.
