Finding Dory (2016)
- To accurately portray their role in Finding Dory, Albert Brooks spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director Andrew Stanton.
- Finding Dory utilized mostly practical sets and locations to ground the story, a specific choice insisted upon by Andrew Stanton.
Finding Dory is a 2016 American animated film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by Andrew Stanton. Set six months after Finding Nemo, the film follows Dory, the blue tang fish with severe short-term memory loss voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, as fragments of her childhood memories begin returning, triggering a quest to find her parents. Dory's journey takes her, along with Marlin and Nemo, to the Marine Life Institute in Morro Bay, California, where she navigates a series of increasingly complex escape-room-like challenges with the help of Hank, a cantankerous seven-legged septopus voiced by Ed O'Neill who wants Dory's transfer tag to escape to permanent aquarium life in Cleveland.
Finding Dory took 13 years to develop after Finding Nemo, a gestation period that allowed Andrew Stanton to craft a story specifically suited to Dory's unique condition rather than simply repeating the original's formula. The film treated Dory's memory loss with remarkable sensitivity, depicting it as a genuine disability that causes real frustration, fear, and social difficulty while also showing how Dory's different way of experiencing the world gives her unique problem-solving abilities. The Marine Life Institute setting allowed Pixar to create environments never before seen in their films, from touch pools to quarantine tanks to a terrifying open-ocean exhibit.
Finding Dory earned $1.03 billion worldwide, making it the third Pixar film to cross the billion-dollar mark, and set the record for the highest-grossing opening weekend for an animated film at the time.
