THIS sequel to “Finding Nemo” is bog-standard Disney/Pixar animation, with a target audience of small fry. Several early-adolescent girls in the row in front of me laughed with delight at passages that I didn’t find funny.

Writer/director Andrew Stanton’s film carefully avoids showing the reality of the fish-eats-fish world, little fish providing feed for bigger fish and so on up the food chain.

It’s okay to anthropomorphise living creatures in animated films. It’s not okay to step back from showing what being a living creature involves. Stanton’s film has no villain. The result is pablum that conveys an incomplete, biased and therefore dishonest message to children.

Dory is a blue tang with a memory span of about 10 seconds. The only thing she does remember is that she was separated from her parents in infancy. She desperately wants to reconnect with them. Together with her cousin Nemo (the little clownfish who became a movie star in 2003) she sets off on her quest.

“Finding Dory” is coloured pretty. The cast (few of which have speaking parts) in the crowd sequences includes cephalopods, cetaceans, ornamental species, reptiles and giant rays. The ending is happy. The last quarter hour is unsupported by any truthful statement of what aquatic life is really about. Is that what you really want your kids to see?

At all cinemas