Too unrealistic for my taste.

Rating: 2/10 (5 February 2017)

The only reason I didn't give this 1 star is because of Gerald's sweet eyebrows and Becky because I like birds. Saying it's a kids' movie doesn't cut it since adults watch the movie, too. And yes, they're talking fish, but against everything else, you might as well have put a rabbit in the water and gave it underwater-breathing powers with the way this film is structured.
Why would a solitary clownfish in the Great Barrier Reef know what California was, let alone where? How did he find the migrating turtles again and so easily? Why did they bring Nemo on the adventure? Not to mention, within the coast of California is a pocket of cold water that brings in sweet spawning fish but threatening temperatures to the tropical fish friends. Toxins and pH levels are a big thing for fish, and Marlin and Dory are no exceptions, so why California of all places? Wouldn't it have made sense to just create a fake aquarium in Australia and have the gang go there?
Octopi do have the ability to camouflage and stay out of water for periods of time, but the speed at which Hank moves is disturbing and too quick for a real octopus. At that point, we'd have lots of land-dwelling, rock-hopping octopi on our beaches, would't we? And there really was no point of Hank wanting to live his life out peacefully in a tank if he was going to die in a couple of years if he was lucky. Octopi sadly don't live very long despite their high intelligence.
Speaking of intelligence, how did Dory learn to read? Who taught her? If it was her parents, who taught them? Were there--pardon me--schools of fish to teach the English language? Dory also speaks whale, but Destiny is not a whale; she is a shark, a fish. she's also a fish that can leap completely out of an enclosure which doesn't make sense because she doesn't have the capability of swimming fast enough to gain enough velocity to propel her enormous weight out of said water.
I also feel bad because when it said Dory was part of the open ocean exhibit and I see all these fish bunched up in a tall column of water, I couldn't help but feel sorry for all of the sunfish, sharks, tuna, and turtles that obviously weren't crammed in the appropriate exhibit name. You couldn't even get the name of the exhibit right. Open ocean means open ocean, not claustrophobic tropical reef pipe.
Bailey's echolocation is over-powered. Echolocation doesn't work the same out of water as it does in the water. How did the sound travel so far and span out across a 360-degree area and feed into his brain fast enough for him to process the spatial awareness around him?
The water-hopping with Marlin and Nemo wasn't great, either. They went from cold California-hardened seawater to freshwater to mop water and then to fresh/seawater again. In the case that the changes in water didn't kill them, they would be very very sick. Also how is Nemo still a kid? It's been a year. "He" should have reached sexual maturity by now, and he should've matured into a she with the current (ha) conditions.
Why are Dory's parents still alive? Blue tangs need warm water to survive. How did they live in the cold California Pacific for that long? What about in winter when the temperatures and currents change? Pixar, your studio is a hop and a skip away to the ocean. What happened to consulting marine biologists on this?
Do people genuinely find it funny when an octopus and blue tang hijack a van with hundreds of fishy lives and pile it through busy traffic, potentially killing and harming dozens of innocent people? I'd hope not, but that's what I got from this movie.
At the end of the movie, everyone followed them all the way back to the Great Barrier Reef. Beluga whales live in cold waters where their proper food spawn. Doesn't that put stress on Bailey? What if I threw the writers of this film into the Antarctic to join their penguin friends without proper equipment and told them to find food and shelter without any knowledge of the area? Is that heartwarming and entertaining? No.
The movie itself, was really bland. I almost envisioned the whole thing as a high-budget movie-based video game with smooth graphics. The areas are divided specifically like dungeons with obstacles and stealth sequences. However, nothing in the movie stood out to me in memory. I don't remember any dialogue being spoken from the characters, I had little care for the fish.
This movie didn't even feel like a movie. It's like they got middle-school writers to write a G-rated fan-fiction "Finding Nemo" adventure for their 4-year old sibling who wanted a story about Dory finding her parents because of a single exchange of dialogue uttered in the film. I think it was deliberately made because someone wanted to make another movie just because? I'm not sure, so don't take it seriously, but if that was the case, then it clearly shows.
The kids might like this film. Disney-blind consumers and Pixar enthusiasts might like it, but not me. I felt like I spent the course of 2 hours verbally criticizing this garbage with my family, and that, coupled with Gerald's sweet eyebrows and Becky's cameo, were the only forms of entertainment I got out of it all. Not the story, not the characters, and definitely not the writing or logic. Oh gosh, it was bad.