Film Quote of the Day: Pixar's Best Advice Comes From Dory in 'Finding Nemo'

Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), the forgetful blue tang from Pixar’s Finding Nemo, is perhaps Pixar’s single best dispenser of life advice. The animation studio is known for delivering emotional movies with strong messages, but this dopey comic relief fish manages to stumble headfirst into more meaningful quotes than even their wisest characters.

Her mantra, “just keep swimming,” is obviously an important one. However, her deepest and most widely applicable advice comes from the punchline at the end of the following scene, where she is talking with her new friend Marlin (Albert Brooks), a clownfish who is desperately looking for his lost son, Nemo (Alexander Gould).

Marlin: “I promised I'd never let anything happen to him.”

Dory: “Hmm. That's a funny thing to promise.”

Marlin: “What?”

Dory: “Well, you can't never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him. Not much fun for little Harpo.”

Dory Teaches Marlin a Tough but Important Lesson

Dory might not remember names very well, but she clearly has the fundamentals down pat, considering the fact that her advice to Nemo’s dad is entirely sound. In what seems to her to be a casual conversation, she actually expresses a major difference between the two characters’ core philosophies.

Marlin’s life has been defined by being an overprotective dad. This is only natural, considering the fact that he is trying to manage being a single parent while processing a great deal of trauma. The loss of his wife and the majority of their eggs to a barracuda attack leads him to desperately try to avoid losing anything else and pouring all of that energy toward his young son. He is also drastically overcompensating for Nemo’s disability: his right fin is smaller than his left, which is a result of his egg being damaged in the attack.

‘Finding Nemo’ (2003)Credit: Buena Vista Pictures Distribution

Marlin views Nemo as helpless because of this, even though he has grown to an age where, while he is still young and vulnerable, he has enough sense to handle many aspects of the outside world, as he proves while navigating the unfamiliar environment of a dentist’s fish tank, where he finds himself trapped for the majority of the movie.

On the other hand, Dory’s lack of pretense allows her to see people exactly as they are. Marlin is a potential friend (even though he doesn’t think so). And Nemo is simply a kid, not a breakable object to be kept forever on a shelf in a protective case.

Marlin ultimately comes to understand Dory’s worldview. By opening his heart to his new friend, he is able to deemphasize Nemo as the single most important person in his life. Simultaneously, he comes to understand that the safe life he envisioned for Nemo is too empty to allow such a vibrant child to thrive.

Dory’s Advice is Applicable to Everyone

While Dory’s advice is directly applicable to Marlin and to many overprotective parents both off and on the screen (overprotective parents have learned similar lessons in a wide variety of movies, from Footloose to Hotel Transylvania), it is also an important lesson for people who aren’t parents.

In fact, this is proven by the way that Dory’s advice helps Marlin change his approach to his own life just as much as it helps shape his parenting of Nemo. It is Nemo’s absence and Dory’s encouragement that force him to come out of his proverbial shell and go on an adventure, and that is exactly what teaches him what a shame it would be if “nothing would ever happen.”

Many movies teach this lesson to their protagonists, as well. Dory’s words could apply just as well to the arcs of Rapunzel in Tangled , Bilbo Baggins in the Hobbit trilogy, though the characters are almost diametrically opposed, with the former being naive yet yearning for adventure and the latter abhorring the very idea of stepping foot outside Hobbiton.

‘Tangled’ (2010)Credit: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

What’s most impressive about how universally applicable Dory’s advice turns out to be is the fact that it’s succinctly delivered, by a character who is saying it more or less by accident, within a quick series of lines that sharply defines two specific characters in a movie whose underwater world is entirely separate from the fantasy realms of Tangled and The Hobbit , the small American town of Footloose , and Dracula’s castle in Hotel Transylvania.

All that is thanks to the intelligent, delicate screenwriting work by an inimitable trio of animation veterans, namely Andrew Stanton (WALL-E), Bob Peterson (Up), and David Reynolds (The Emperor's New Groove). Their experience allowed them to create one of the most emotionally resonant Pixar movies, standing out among a group of titles for which emotional resonance tends to be a primary goal.

For more advice from the movies, check out the No Film School back catalogue, which features breakdowns of classic, meaningful lines spoken in everything from The Empire Strikes Back to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to The Graduate.