Why Finding Nemo 2 is Fantastic, Why Finding Nemo 2 is Terrible · 10:55am Jun 22nd, 2016
I had absolutely no idea what I was going to write for a blog post this week, but then my friends of mine took me out to see the new Pixar movie and it is actually really interesting to talk about.
So I'm going to do that. SPOILERS AFTER THE BREAK
Let's break this up into categories, and those categories into my three favourite subdivisions: Good, bad and ugly.
Let's approach the movie as a whole and chip it down, bit by bit!
The Good:
-- Genuinely fantastic visual humour.
-- All the side characters are great and bounce off each other well.
-- Ahh... hrrm. Like, those are two very big things, right? But I can't think of a third.
The Bad
-- The main plot falls flat.
-- The main character arc is actually painful.
-- The main friendship arc is forced and handwaved.
The Ugly
-- This was obviously a movie based on a terrible executive decision and executed by fantastic writers. You can only put so much polish on a turd. I blame Ellen.
-- Marlin and Nemo are sidelined hard, because what do you do with characters that have already had a movie dedicated to completing their character arcs.
-- The writers threw in a lot of jokes about this being a sequel they obviously did not want to do in the first act, less for being genre aware and more sounding like "Pinkie, Elmyra and the Brain" opening theme: It's what the network wants, why bother to complain?
Okay that's a good start.
The biggest thing in this movie's favour is that it does have a very strong writing team behind it. That shows up in the pathos, the fantastic moments of humour, and the side characters that have great lines, great quirks, and mini-arcs of their own. All solid.
The biggest problem comes with this being a sequel. Marlin and Nemo tag along for the ride because it's their name in the title, but they're mostly there to remind us of the branding. Everything that made Dory work as a side character utterly ruins her potential to be a lead lady: Her main character flaw is a neurological illness, which defines her. She is an unchanging agent of chaos which is great when it's influencing another character's arc, but... well, it's Joey from Friends, yeah?
You pity Dory. You sympathise, but you can't empathise or relate to her. She is utterly unrelatable to most. She also can't develop, because she doesn't have a flaw that can be dealt with on a personal quest. This leaves the writers with two options: A character arc that has no arc, that does not exist, or a character that has the single most insulting take home message in a kid's movie since... the 1960's I guess?
They chose the right choice. They made it terrible, and I applaud them for their restraint. But the end result is this is a genuine problem for a character arc: She starts off as alien and unempathizable, and stays there for the whole movie. Eesh.
As a result, the main arc feels very... token? It feels twee and token. The payoff... doesn't hit emotionally. Not nearly as much as the buildup should have let it. The actual moment leading up to it is sweet but... the result of it is basically "Okay we're done here back to B plot now" and it's... rushed. And I think I know why. The screenwriters saw the plotline was dead weight and axed time dedicated to it as much as possible to focus on the stronger points. It was a good decision, but it was damage control and this is the resulting bruise.
The strong points, then, are the side characters. All of them have a very strong personality. They're all as bright and vivid as the original characters in Finding Nemo: Beat for beat, a bioluminescent squid replaces the angler fish. Nigel the Pelican is divided down the middle between sea lions -- who effectively carry every scene they're in to compensate for, at the time in the narrative, Nemo and Marlin's dead weight -- and Hank really carries the movie at times, a visually interesting and inteprid put-upon character who so desperately wants to live in the Cleveland aquarium.
Ladies and Gentleman: The only movie where going to Cleveland is presented as the win objective.
Unfortunately this movie has to make him and Dory friends. Relationship arc is meant to be based on them both growing and understanding each other as characters, yeah? But you can't do that when your protagonist can't. So his friendship with Dory by the end of their friendship arc feels... incredibly deus ex. She has done absolutely nothing to change from being the character that initially frustrated him, and the one token act of plot to change that is... she drags them from one end of a touch tank to the other and they're scared of getting touched by kids. Then the octopus gets touched and sprays ink everywhere and that's what saves them.
I'm sitting there thinking... all he had to do, of his own independent will, was ink the tank. Dragging him across the tank the way they did just... it was there to give Dory agency, but it accomplished nothing. It was like if a heist movie had a dramatic exchange with the driver by having the escaping members jump in the getaway car, have a dramatic chase scene around the block, then get to the original location they left from and get back in to barricade it. Sure, you get a fantastic chase scene. But it's just an unneccessary step to build tension in an incredibly artificial way.
A situation Dory's fuck ups put them into in the first place, in an incredibly frustrating and awful way.
As a result, their friendship after the fact, which just takes it for granted, is just... It's very 'why'? Why does he continue to go out of his way for this person/fish he has no reason to... it's convenient in the worst of ways.
The third act after all this is redeeming. I laughed a lot. It's fantastic. But the ending scene, that was... just bad.
It wrapped up the movie with a whimper, not a bang. It receded. It ended. It hammered home just how hollow and empty and meaningless the main plot and character arc had been; because they had nothing to do with it, they had no way to end it satisfactorily. They just couldn't. So we get an epilogue which is the cinematic equivalent of an apologetic shrug.
I still urge you to see this movie though. It's fascinating. It shows you just what really talented screenwriters can do with a bad idea, and what the limitations are to salvaging it. It's also really useful for figuring out what does and does not make a protagonist work and why.
It's a great learning experience, and the parts where the writers and animators aren't constrained to the sequelitis are where this movie is truly allowed to shine.
Special thanks again to my Patrons, like DarksZero, Serifina, CaveMonkyNick, Ferret, Horizon, Ariamaki, DJThomp, Hoopy McGee and if I'm missing you, I don't have your FimFic account tied to your name yet. Message me if you want that fixed.
I want to read this but I haven't watched finding Dory yet
Have not seen, can't read.
Wasn't planning on seeing it... mainly because of the gigantic problem you described above: The main character's arc is either pointless or a cheat.
But after this review, I think I'm curious enough about the "salvage attempt" to give it a look.
I'm not surprised. The only sequel they've made that really felt all that good was Toy Story 3, which was joked about by Cracked before they actually went there. It was a place for the premise to go that was actually interesting.
Unless the world is actually designed to be open-ended, sequels are pretty much a crapshoot.
My biggest problem with this movie is that it went from cartoon to Cartoon. And there's a big difference. While the original Finding Nemo, and most of Pixar's other movies, had depth and kept within their own universe, Finding Dory went unrealistically into the realm of wanky cartoon shenanigans.
Basically, what I mean, is that most of my suspension of disbelief was shattered due to certain things happening that was a bit TOO unrealistic in the world that they set up in Finding Nemo (A certain truck scene and fountain scene come to mind, and MOST of the things Hank gets away with).
Hence, this had the effect of taking out all the dramatic tension and weight to most of the story, In the original Finding Nemo, I BELIEVED that they might get hurt. I BELIEVED in the danger and the problems and the fear and threats. I BELIEVED that Nemo was in actual danger.
In Finding Dory, it was more like watching a sequence of rather humorous events that eventually led to the ending with no stakes whatsoever, because everything was cartoonish enough that I believed that anything could happen and there really wasn't going to be any issue. It was just a sequence of exciting sequences that finally led to where it was meant to be.
Now, such movies aren't that bad. I can very much appreciate certain movies that are very clear-cut from the start that really do lay it out on the table that the journey is far more important than the actual story itself (Dredd 3D and John Wick, for example), but Finding Dory DID have a conflicting message due to the emotional core that was held by the whole 'where's muh mommy' plot, which works against the idea of a movie that needs to be watched mindlessly,
That said, I still think it's very watchable because it's gorgeous, and there are certain scenes of fun, and I really enjoyed it overall as just a thing on a screen. I can't appreciate the writing decisions, but I can appreciate nearly everything else. Hank was great as a character, and his scenes are just insane, and it kind of frightens me how real animation can get.
The bad is that they really fucking FUCKING overused the 'I speak Whale' joke. I think it was funny in Finding Nemo BECAUSE it was absurd, and it worked as a throw-away joke, but it's like they took all the parts of what made Finding Nemo annoying and made a full movie out of it.
And holy shit, who did Sigourney Weaver have to bribe?
Oh, and I got another 'good' for ya.
The pre-movie short, Piper, was the best short I watched since Paperboy. I kinda wanted to leave the theater after it. That was worth my 7 bucks.
TL;DR
Not as good as Zootopia
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We are in complete agreement over Piper.
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But we should be in complete agreement over Sigourney Weaver.
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My friend, Sigourney.
Yeah.
But the movie made me even more depressed, because I watched it shortly after reading a section from The Screenwriter's Bible that recommends writing a movie to have:
- a character who has a goal
- which the character can't achieve because of a character flaw
- which the character acquired during one specific event in his/her past which he/she has forgotten
- which the character solves very suddenly during the climax in Act 3, likely by remembering the specific event from his/her past
I have been aware of this pattern for years, and it makes me angry, because it's so stupid--that isn't how people work!
But I was watching "Finding Nemo 2" and thinking, "At least they won't do the stupid 'character resolves plot problem by remembering something from her past and thus solving her lifelong character flaw in an instant' trope, because they can't!" And then... they tried to anyway.
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I consider myself a screenwriting satanist.
I am more than willing to put up with Disney/Pixar producing unneeded sequels if by doing so it permits Pixar to continue creating originals like WALL•E, Inside Out, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille. Also, Piper.