For most of the movie, Dory is not able to find her parents, and despite her best attempts, she has moments where it's clear she's losing hope that they'll ever get to be a family again. Yet by the end of the movie, Dory and her folks manage to reunite, and it's just as heartwarming a moment as you'd hope.
With the help of her new friends and self-confidence, she saves Nemo, Hank, Marlin and the rest of the animals bound for Cleveland. The film ends with Dory living happily back at the reef with Nemo, Marlin, Hank and her parents.
And when her parents weren't teaching her these skills, Dory also remembered how they would oftentimes worry about whether or not she would be truly ok on her own. Because of these flashbacks, Dory's decides to go on a quest to find her parents once and for all.
What happened to the fish at the end of Finding Nemo?
2003's "Finding Nemo" ends with Marlin and his son Nemo reunited. But it also ends with a mini cliffhanger: the Tank Gang, a posse of fish stuck with Nemo in a dentist's office, makes it to the ocean stuck in plastic bags.
They developed a deep trust in one another, and Dory felt as if she had finally found a home in Marlin. At the end of the Pixar animated movie, Dory joined Marlin and Nemo in returning to the Great Barrier Reef, and Dory pledged to help her new friend raise his son.
These problems in encoding new information are hallmarks of anterograde amnesia. Dory describes her condition as “short-term memory loss” which is the way most people refer to the problem of encoding new information that is the hallmark of anterograde amnesia.
In a flashback Dory hears her mother crying in fears of being relocated to another aquarium, so she left to retrieve a shell to cheer her up, to which she was pulled away by an undertow current out into the ocean.
Dory suffers from severe short-term memory loss, but a lot of what she goes through can be adapted to other contexts, such as the world, or ocean, of ADHD. Dory has trouble with multi-step directions, is easily distracted, and is very impulsive.
The companionship that emerges is completely genuine. Nonetheless, Dory and Marlin's relationship is a complicated and interesting one. Some view Dory as Marlin's companion and speculate that the two are actually lovers.
Short-term memory loss is a rare condition. It's also much more extreme than ADHD and executive functioning issues. Yet Dory's struggles will still feel very familiar to kids with attention issues. She's easily distracted.
Another dark Pixar theory suggests the animated film predominantly set under the sea is meant to showcase the tragic loss in the eyes of a husband and father. More specifically, the theory posits that Nemo never existed in the movie, and instead was a figment of Marlin the clownfish's imagination.
Dory, a happy-go-lucky Regal Blue Tang, suffers from anterograde amnesia, or the inability to form new memories. It was well-established in Finding Nemo that Dory has this condition, which is more commonly known as short-term memory loss.
Andrew Stanton wrote and directed the film. The inspiration for Finding Nemo sprang from multiple experiences, going back to director Andrew Stanton's childhood, when he loved going to the dentist to see the fish tank, assuming that the fish were from the ocean and wanted to go home.
Nemo is a curious and impressionable six-year-old, only child who lives with his overprotective, single-parent father, Marlin. Having led a sheltered life, Nemo brims with the excitement of starting school and finally seeing the wonders of the Great Barrier Reef.
Dory subsequently has flashbacks of life with her parents and struggles to recall details. She finally remembers how she was separated from her parents: she overheard her mother crying one night, left to retrieve a shell to cheer her up, and was pulled away by an undertow current out into the ocean.
It's quite obvious that Dory has anterograde amnesia, which is the inability to form new memories. I also see many of the signs of ADHD within the character.
The friendly fish's character-defining short-term memory loss, once solely a source of comic relief, is now explored with more dimension and gravity; heartbroken, Dory enters into a state of grieving and borderline self-loathing, blaming herself for losing her family and even worse, forgetting them altogether.
Dory's scars from her travel through the jellyfish in Finding Nemo (2003) have disappeared. They may well have healed in the time between the two films.
However, a few armchair experts have pointed out the similarities between Dory's symptoms and a condition called anterograde amnesia. Anterograde amnesia can be caused by an injury or disease that damages the parts of the brain responsible for forming memories.
Many of the characters' humorous idiosyncrasies could be called "abnormalities." Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), a lively blue tang who becomes Marlin's sidekick on the quest for Nemo's rescue, has chronic short-term memory loss.
On coral reefs, “Dory,” the small vibrant blue fish with black stripes and a yellow tail, is known by several other names: Hippo Tang, Royal Blue Tang, Regal Tang, Palette Surgeonfish and by the scientific name Paracanthurus hepatus.
Nemo is a young clownfish who's the only son of Marlin. Nemo and Marlin were the sole survivors after a barracuda attack that caused Marlin's partner, Coral, and their other 400 fish eggs to perish.
Finding Nemo is a CGI animated film series and Disney media franchise that began with the 2003 film of the same name, produced by Pixar and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The original film was followed by a sequel, Finding Dory, released in 2016. Both films were directed by Andrew Stanton.
