"Finding Dory"

Now that my son Lucas is almost 4, I'm introducing him to the movie theater experience - large screen, 5.1 surround sound, popcorn, coke, and sharing the space with large audiences.  Also, he loves the trailers (which should really be called "previews", since they come before the movies now, they don't "trail" after...).

The most recent screening we attended was Pixar's "Finding Dory", and one of the extras was the world premiere of the new Pixar short "Piper".  In the past, the Pixar shorts have been very imaginative and entertaining, however this one seemed to be created to test some kind of new digital technique, because there was absolutely no entertainment value in it.  Plus, the film was so photo-realistic, it could have been one of the old Disney nature documentaries.  The storytelling was nil and it felt like it was created by a robot.

Not so with "Finding Dory", a spin-off of the ever-popular "Finding Nemo", which was very fresh and entertaining.

The new film takes forever to get started - it seems like the first 30 minutes of the film are about two issues: #1 - Dory has short-term memory loss, and #2 - she wants to find her parents.  How can they waste so much time on such simple ideas?

Once it finally gets going, the characters are flat - they don't have the personality of the characters from the original film.  Two really lame characters are the whale shark and the beluga whale.  A total waste of time, why not bring back the A.A. great white sharks from the original - in fact, my son kept asking, "Where are the sharks?"

Although my son liked the film overall, I was very disappointed and felt that "it fell very far behind the original "Finding Nemo", although I hear it's making a tidal wave of money! 

Here are my scores:

"Piper": C   "Finding Dory": B-