Pixar to find Dory!

April was supposed to ring in the happiness. But happiness is taking its own sweet time to enter my life. Hollywood seems to have taken a mini-break of sorts after the Joes wrecked loads of mayhem last time I checked. There has been hardly any news worthy item going around. And the optimist in me says that it is the lull before the storm. A good storm I refer to. Something that shall be called Iron Man 3.  Till then we live on the crumbs that are being offered. An irrelevant trailer here and there. New movie posters. And announcements of how life would be like in 2015 or 2016 or however far you wish to worry on. Life = Hollywood, when you are reading this blog. So this probably has been the most interesting story that has cropped up in recent days. Announcement by Pixar that Finding Nemo, the gigantic hit of 2003 (gosh, how time flies!), will have a sequel titled Finding Dory, releasing in 2015.

Remember Dory? Of course, you do! The blue coloured bumbling tang fish with a memory worthy of... eh, a fish, voiced by Ellen DeGeneres, captured many hearts in the first movie. And Dory is getting her rewards now, a film with her own name on it! The trick here is... it's a sequel. Now, I love franchises. I really do. They add the element of longevity. They create a broader universe, spanning a longer period, and if it's something like  Star Wars you might be watching the next trilogy with your son and at the same time recollecting watching the original with your dad! Nostalgia, that's a big thing to make sequels work. But when it comes to Pixar, I am not entirely convinced. 

People at Pixar are geniuses in connecting the audience emotionally with their characters and so it must have made economic sense to always look for a sequel after the first one gave a grand return. Somehow they safeguarded themselves from this temptation. Toy Story being the exception, Pixar have prided themselves in the original work that they keep creating, churning one massive hit after another, keeping those lovable characters coming. It must be a tough task, to do it so consistently. And then came Cars 2 in 2011. It just lacked everything that Pixar stood for; it lacked the heart, the story, the moments that made you forget it's an animation film after all. It banked on people still being in love with McQueen and Mater and would enjoy whatever the duo did. Wrong! It turned out to be the weakest movie Pixar created. It still made good money, but more from the goodwill of the original than the brilliance of the sequel. And this year, there is Monsters University, a prequel to Monsters Inc. Again the initial trailer has hardly left me excited. And even though I'm likely to end up in the theatre along with many others, I got a bad feeling about this too. 

The brilliance of Toy Story series lay in the manner the story moved from one movie to the other as Andy, the owner of the toys, grew. The relationship between the toys changed, the complexities increased, and somewhere in all this they grew into a more cohesive unit at the end of it all. Can you recreate that magic in Finding Dory? Can you grab the story of the first one and the relationships already developed therein and then take it a step forward? Pixar of course can do it, the expertise is not in doubt. But will the focus of holding on to the magic of a Pixar movie when working on a sequel remain as it does in an original? Especially when Pixar have The Good Dinosaur lined up for 2014 and Inside Out for 2015. The 2015 release for Finding Dory would also mark the first time that Pixar released two full-length films in an year. I'm a bit skeptical on how good will it all be. And I wish I'm wrong. And that everything goes well. And that Pixar never turns into a corporate entity seeking only the returns in form of green bucks while forgetting the rewards of the loudest applause. And that the world of Pixar remains magical and alluring as it has always been. The next few years could highlight a lot about the way Pixar is shaping up. Time to wait and watch!