The first couple of trailers for Finding Dory have been cute and bubbly, playing up the titular character’s memory loss and her journey to find her family for child-friendly laughs. The newest trailer, however, gets a bit more emotional—and reminds us that one of the key ingredients to Pixar’s success is its ability to go straight for the tear ducts.
There are also some good gags throughout, but at one point during their adventure, Nemo looks to his dad Marlin and asks hesitantly, “Does this mean we have to say goodbye to Dory?” It’s a brief moment but a reassuring one for Pixar fans who have found some of their more recent output (aside from Inside Out) to be not as emotionally satisfying as their earlier work. It’s probably safe to say that, 13 years later, none of us were exactly clamoring for a Finding Nemo sequel, but this trailer suggests that there will be more to it than just aquatic puns and jokes about squids who accidentally “ink” when they get nervous. Perhaps Finding Dory will retain at least some of its predecessor’s heartwarming storytelling in a way that, say, Monsters University, did not.
