Indiewire’s Bill Desowitz has a great interview with “Finding Dory” writer/director Andrew Stanton. “Finding Nemo” is my favorite Pixar film, so perfect it was hard to imagine a sequel. So it was reassuring to hear that director Andrew Stanton felt the same way.

“I thought it was a closed circuit —it was everything I had wanted to say,” admitted Stanton in Monterey, just a block away from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which inspired the main location in “Finding Dory.” “And the brain works in mysterious ways. I couldn’t stop thinking about Dory and how she didn’t have the ability to find her way home if she ever got lost again. And she found this wonderful family. And I always knew she was a tragic figure in my mind when I created her. And I couldn’t drop it….for Stanton, the biggest challenge was wrapping his head around Dory, who went from endearing sidekick to conflicted protagonist. “She’s driven by an internal fear of being alone and she deserves to not be driven by fear anymore and to embrace that,” he said. “And to know that that’s her superpower, not her weakness. But it took about two years to realize that self-reflection is necessary to track growth in a main character.”

It has been a great pleasure to feel the audience grow up with Pixar and the idea of giving the new undersea adventure more layers of emotional resonance means that this will be a journey of the spirit I am excited to experience.