Finding Dory — Pixar’s latest box office hit — picks up where Finding Nemo left off, a year after that rebellious clownfish was found and rescued from the dentist’s tank in Sydney, Australia. Nemo’s friend, Dory, a natural blue who suffers from short-term memory loss, isn’t adjusting well to daily life in the Great Barrier Reef — repeatedly, she stings herself swimming into the sea anemone. She regularly disrupts Nemo’s class. Although she has found a place to call home, her memory loss affects her and her friends every moment. It consumes her life so completely that, in some ways, it becomes her.

When a swarm of stingrays jogs a distant memory of her parents, Dory realizes how much she longs to be with them. The problem is that she cannot remember who they are or how she lost them. Marlin and Nemo — against Marlin’s better, more reproachful judgment — follow her to the California coast where they are separated in Sigourney Weaver’s Marine-Life Institute in Morro Bay.

The charisma of Dory’s character takes center stage so commandingly that Nemo and Marlin, who we came to love in the previous film, become essentially sidekicks. There’s a good reason for this. Dory’s power as a character resides, well, first in Ellen’s perfect voiceover, and second in the fact that she forces us to confront an uncomfortable reality, what equates to an intellectual disability. We learn to get comfortable with her; our moviegoing lives get used to her and the discomfort she represents. We learn to feel for her but not to pity her.

When I saw Finding Nemo as a child, Dory was mostly funny, but also a little bit frightening — she made me uncomfortable. I knew that memory loss was a painful reality, and although I did understand that her condition could be humorous, I had to wonder: Did the filmmakers have to create her this way?

In Finding Dory, the filmmakers decided not to shy away from that discomfort but to swim (ah ha) deeper into it. Dory is just as cloudy-eyed and disoriented as ever. In some moments, it can be heartbreaking; in others, Dory makes us laugh. Most of the people I know suffering from long-term illness, whether mental or physical, are often, but not always, down-and-out about it. A sense of humor about themselves and their condition typically keeps them afloat. As Ethan wrote in Law and Gospel: “In various ways, either through satire or self-deprecation, humor is a way of uncoupling the truth from its sting.”

To me, this is one of Pixar’s most remarkable gifts to date, to illustrate a mental health issue and, by using a sense of humor, make it more familiar to a kid audience — while at the same time not diminishing its gravity.

The most important thing Dory forgets is how much she is loved. This is the main driving factor behind her constant sense of homelessness, her unending need to search for a better place. As Sarah pointed out last week, people make bad choices when they are “acting out of anxiety and fear, hurt and blame, all because they have forgotten how loved they are.” But Marlin and Nemo risk their lives — flying across the sky in the clutches of a bird named Becky — to find Dory and remind her that no matter how forgetful she may be, she is and will always be loved.

Her memory loss also means, however, that she is always open to new ideas — ideas that come from outside herself. She is constantly looking for new possibilities and never gets cynical. She is always up for meeting new characters and accepts each new fish’s particular strangeness with a wide-eyed admiration. In this sense, her slate is always being washed clean. And she is always washing clean the slates of others: Marlin’s, for example. She forgets all the bad things he says about her, as if he never even said them. “Marlin never really believed that I could speak whale,” she explains, “but, you know, he trusts me anyways.” She completely forgets that he doesn’t trust her at all; in fact, his distrust of her is what leads her to get lost in the first place. He’d told her to go away, that she was dangerous for him and his son, and so she swam off and was separated from them.

When they are reunited, she doesn’t need an apology. Her memory loss means that his slate is clear. Uncomfortable with this, Marlin apologizes anyway.

Ultimately, for the sake of finding her family, Dory gets herself into crazy situations. More times than you can count, she finds herself slipping down a drain, flipping through the air, crashing an 18-wheeler into the Pacific Ocean. Nothing that happens in Sigourney Weaver’s Marine-Life Institute is within Dory’s control, so she lives with her hands — fins — open. And it’s not her good deeds, her happy memories, her stable lifestyle, or her steady income that reunite her with her family. It’s her downward spiral, out-of-control empty-mindedness that drops her into the quiet blue water where they await, where they rush to her, and where she is embraced by a love that she could never forget.

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