Finding others

In 2008, during an interview to promote WALL-E, writer/director Andrew Stanton told me, “The greatest commandment Christ gives us is to love, but that’s not always our priority. … We’re not engaging in relationships, which are the point of living—relationship with God and relationship with other people.”

Stanton has had a hand in nearly every one of Pixar’s blockbusters. He is a professing Christian, and the theme of relationship plays a role in all the feature films he’s written, but perhaps none more so than Finding Nemo and now Finding Dory, rated PG for mild elements like Dory mistakenly thinking she’s being called upon to explain the birds and the bees (or maybe the sharks and the squids?) to a group of schoolchildren. (Don’t worry, it’s a sweet, family-affirming scene, and smaller kids won’t get why mom and dad are laughing.)

When we catch up with everyone’s favorite forgetful blue tang, a year has passed since she helped clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) search the ocean-wide for his son, Nemo (Hayden Rolence). Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) now lives next door, and dealing with her short-term memory disability has become a constant source of frustration for Marlin. He’s even more frustrated when Dory starts to remember a few things, like where she’s from and how she lost her parents back in Morro Bay, Calif. Nemo helps Marlin realize that as Dory’s new family, they have a responsibility to help her find her old one.

A few characters from the first film resurface, like surfer-dude sea turtle Crush (voiced hilariously, as he was in Nemo, by Stanton himself). But for the most part Finding Dory offers a whole new array of aquatic animals with characteristics that point up Stanton’s thematic preoccupation. Curmudgeonly, seven-armed octopus Hank (Ed O’Neill), for instance, wants nothing more than to make it to a tank in a zoo in Cleveland where he can live out the rest of his life alone, unmolested by the irritating needs and shortcomings of people like a severely nearsighted whale shark, a pathologically insecure beluga, or a surgeonfish with short-term memory loss.

Despite stunning artistry that leaves you awed at the simple image of kelp waving in the current, Finding Dory suffers at times from sloppy plotting, and some sight gags seem to fill no other purpose than passing time. At one point fish are flying everywhere and we can’t quite remember who’s trying to get where and why. But even if Dory doesn’t quite measure up to its groundbreaking predecessor, it still provides plenty of entertainment as well as some wonderful opportunities to discuss with children what living as Christ commands us to really looks like when it comes to difficult people.

As Stanton noted, Christ calls us to community and to fellowship despite our faults. But we’re fallen creatures, and sometimes we find the limitations of others irritating. So, like Marlin, we don’t bear them perfectly. We forget to encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, and be patient with everyone. Or, like Hank, we think that if we separate ourselves from others, so they can’t make demands on us, we can escape responsibility. Until, that is, we remember that we need others to bear with us too.

That’s what fellowship is. That, as we see in Finding Dory, is what family is, and it should lead to an ever-broadening circle of those we welcome into the fellowship.

(One final note—while it’s annoying to have to address this issue at all, contra news reports you may have heard, there’s nothing to indicate that two women briefly glimpsed during a madcap escape scene are lesbians. There’s also nothing to indicate that they aren’t. They’re just two people having an unsettling encounter with an octopus disguised as a baby.)