Why This Finding Dory Plot Idea About Her Parents Had To Be Cut

Every film's script undergoes the grueling process of cuts and changes from a team of creatives that ensure its quality outcome. Perhaps it's especially more so for Pixar, a company which has produced award-winning movies with beloved characters that stick to viewers even years after their movie's release.

Well, such is the case for the script of Finding Dory, and during the script's breakdown process, there's one facet about Dory's parents which had to be abandoned. Apparently, one of Andrew Stanton's original ideas for Dory's parents was that they have the same condition as Dory, who has short-term memory loss.

In an interview with Cinema Blend, director Andrew Stanton explained the reason why the idea was eventually dropped. He said:

She has this line in the first movie, she says, 'I suffer from short-term memory loss. It runs in my family. At least, I think it does.' And I spent the first year and half, maybe two, with my writer, Victoria Strouse, trying to make parents with short-term memory loss work - and I don't recommend it, because it's annoying to have three people with short-term memory loss try to talk to each other. It's not funny for that long. It's annoying very quickly. It was a problem, and so we abandoned that.

I must admit that Dory's condition had me irritated at some point in Finding Nemo, but that didn't last long since the character eventually redeemed herself after helping the protagonists in the end.

Stanton and his team's decision to let go of that short-term memory loss idea about Dory's parents was probably a good idea. It will be hard for the movie to move further from one scene to another when the characters can't remember anything about what has just taken place every 10 minutes or so.

As Stanton mentioned in a recent talk at Google, it took years before their team finally finished the final draft for Finding Dory, so clearly a lot of changes to some plots had to be made. However, during the CB interview, the filmmaker revealed that there were some things that they didn't change at all since the early drafts of the script. One of these is that he always knew he wanted the movie to be about Dory's search for her family, as well as that she should "resolve her feelings about herself."

Do you think Stanton made the right decision?

Finding Dory is now in theaters.

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