12 things to know about Pixar’s ‘Finding Dory,’ featuring life after ‘Finding Nemo’

1. The film takes place 6 months after the events of Finding Nemo. We see a clip of Nemo at school, happy and well-adjusted.

2. (Alexander Gould, who was the original voice of Nemo, is now 21. Hayden Rolence voices Nemo in Finding Dory.) 

3. Dory is pulled into an undertow and gets knocked out, but she’s all right. Later, we see her swimming in her sleep – and Marlin and Nemo go after Dory to make sure she doesn’t swim away.

Nemo suggests to Marlin that what’s at work might be a migration pattern, that Dory is drawn away towards something. There’s a funny moment where Marlin tells Nemo that not everything learned in school has a practical application.

Later, Dory has another episode and begins to wonder about going back to her family. Marlin is hesitant about traveling away from home again, but Dory begs him to think about what it’s like to worry about family. Marlin understands, and it appears this sets the film’s events in motion. Their journey leads them to the kelp forests of northern California. 

4. Destination: Monterey Marine Life Institute, California, where most of the film will take place. In the clip we see Dory in an aquarium, but Marlin and Nemo are nowhere in sight, so it appears they get separated at some point. 

5. We’re introduced to a few more characters: Bailey the beluga whale, voiced by Modern Family‘s Ty Burrell, and a confused whale shark named Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), who thinks she’s a whale but is really a shark.

You can see a little bit of Destiny in the background here:

Bailey thinks he’s injured and that’s why there’s a lump on his head, though actually, that’s what beluga whales really look like. In the short clip, Bailey demonstrates his ability to echolocate, or emitting sounds and using the subsequent echoes to help him determine an object’s location. No doubt that will come into play later. 

You can see a tiny bit of Bailey in the background of the photo below, snapped at August’s D23 expo. 

6. There’s another clip of Dory meeting gruff and grumpy Hank (Modern Family‘s Ed O’Neill), an octopus who’s lost one leg (so technically, he’s a septopus).

Here’s a photo:

We see truly a truly spectacular sequence where Hank blends into the background outside of his tank, moving freely about the office and coming closer to talk to Dory. I’m pretty sure that ability will come in handy later in the film. 

7. We also get a quick look at Dory’s parents – mom Jenny (Diane Keaton) and Charlie (Eugene Levy). Of course, they closely resemble Dory and just like her, they both have a great sense of humor and are also delightfully offbeat. It seems Jenny is also a tad forgetful. 

Listen to Diane Keaton talking about her role in the 3:58 mark here:

8. The star-studded casting doesn’t end there. The Wire actors Idris Elba and Dominic West are also set to star.

9. Too cute: we will most certainly meet otters in the film, too. The audience let out a collective “aww” at the image. 

10. Miss the mad seagulls from the first film? A large flock of loons, says Jim Morris, is very similar to the seagulls in the first film. 

11. This was not included in the presentation, but here’s something we (and a lot of other fans) noticed when looking at the high resolution image of Dory meeting Hank. To the left, there’s what looks to be a picture of Darla, the feared “fish killer” who wanted to adopt Nemo in the first film.

It looks very similar to the photo that appears in Finding Nemo. We have zero idea what that means, or if it’s just an Easter egg referencing the first movie. 

12. One more detail: Willem Dafoe, the voice of Gill, the hardened moorish idol who springs Nemo from his tank, has confirmed that he will indeed return for Finding Dory. Does this mean the viewers will finally learned what happened to the tank gang after their brave escape into the ocean at the end of the first film?