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"There are no walls in the ocean!"

Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned!

  • Dory, Marlin, and Nemo outswim a Humboldt squid.
  • Destiny recognizes Dory by her ability to speak whale. Even though Dory has been gone for a long time, she still remembers her pipe pal.
  • Nemo calls out Marlin, not for a second letting him forget the heinous thing he said to Dory, in increasingly pointed, deadpan deliveries. He might be just a kid, but he's not afraid to call out his own dad. (This may double as a Funny Moment).
  • Marlin and Nemo use the splash pads to get from the gift shop to the tide pool. They get the idea after thinking "What would Dory do?"
  • Dory guiding Hank through 'Poker's Cove', using her "Just Keep Swimming" mantra. They turned one of the funniest moments from the first movie into an awesome Survival Mantra for this one.
  • Dory's parents went out to look for Dory immediately after she got sucked out of the Open Ocean exhibit, and when they didn't immediately find her, they made a new home in the kelp forest and collected shells, which they then arranged into paths leading in all directions so that Dory would be able to follow them and find her way home. It should also be noted that they did this for years - and they were still at it when she found them.
  • Bailey and Destiny escape from their exhibits to help Dory save her friends.
    Bailey: There are no walls in the ocean!
    Destiny: No walls? Why didn't you say so?! (jumps the aquarium wall)
  • The finale, Dory and Hank steal a freaking truck, while its owners are driving it on the highway. Hank uses his tentacles to drive the truck while Dory, of all people, gives him direction, culminating in the two launching the truck off the cliff, which flips over and releases all the aquatic animals contained within, letting all of them to fall back into the ocean. The sheer craziness of this could even top the 'Toys Drive Car' scene from Toy Story 2, and has to be seen to be believed.
    • It gets better: this was all Dory's idea. In order to get Marlin and Nemo out of the truck, she engineers a roadblock with otters and has Destiny launch her at the truck. Then, when she and Hank are left behind on the truck when it starts moving again, she has him take them out of the emergency exit while the truck is moving. Then they commandeer the truck to get back to the ocean - and drive it off the cliff to bypass a police roadblock.
    • It bears mentioning that this plan? Dory came up with it and didn't really explain what she was up to while she was putting it into action. This means, of course, that she forgot the plan while it was in motion... and then came up with the same plan again in order to pull it off. It worked.
  • While The Stinger is largely Played for Laughs, credit must be given to the Tank Gang for getting all the way from Sydney to California in those little plastic bags.
  • Dory, lost in the kelp forest and beginning to forget where she is and who she's looking for, stops to take a few calming breaths, asks herself "What would Dory do?" and maintains a never-before-seen level of focus as she deduces that the kelp forest is better than open water, and that she can navigate better from the ocean floor, probably while still having no idea what she's trying to accomplish. It leads her directly to her parents.
  • The stingray migration is a visual spectacle that must be seen to be believed. Pixar's animation has been top-notch ever since Toy Story 2, and so any Animation Bump they go through is extremely subtle, so it's nice to see something big like that every once in a while, something that probably wouldn't have been possible to create in the original film, something that subtly indicates that yes, Pixar is still making leaps and bounds in its technical artistry.
  • Dory already has many moments of awesome in the film, but special mention has to go to her young self. In her flashback, she got lost from her parents when she was at a very young age, and from that point on, she has to travel through the ocean all on her own, with no one to guide her until she's all grown up. And since Marlin, Nemo and Dory have to cross an ocean to get to Dory's old home, that means Dory had crossed a whole ocean on her own once before when she was a child. Even more awesome is that considering Dory had lived in an aquarium all her life and has no idea what's out there in the ocean and how dangerous it could be, she still managed to pull through. Several years alone, she managed to evade all kinds of dangers of the ocean and made her way across it, all with a forgetful mind. Just keep swimming, indeed.
  • Counts mostly as heartwarming, but serious props to Jenny and Charlie as parents. Their little daughter can’t remember anything for more than a few seconds and has trouble with the most basic of instructions, but they still love her unconditionally and never get frustrated. Instead, they try their utmost to make sure Dory doesn’t feel like a burden or a freak, and help her work through the disability by disguising memory exercises as games, which is a real teaching technique used for average and/or handicapped children alike.
    • In this same vein, props to Pixar for not doing the easy thing and thinking of a way to write out her disability during the course of the movie but instead showing how her unfocused mind can actually be useful to her in certain scenarios. Biggest show of this is during the truck scene where it was still obvious that she couldn't recall exactly what she needed to do but was able to take the little pieces of what she could remember and use them to piece together what she was supposed to do. It takes some serious writing chops to put a seriously mentally-challenged character into a kid's movie like this and not try to "fix" them but instead use their disability in a unique and interesting way that can save the day.

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