A fish searches for Mom and Dad

Finding Dory is a sweet little sequel to 2003's Finding Nemo.

Suffice it to say that although Finding Dory, the latest animated feature from the Disney/Pixar alliance, lacks the freshness of its predecessor, Finding Nemo, and although it wears its "you-can-do-it" message with all the subtlety of a political yard sign, it's entertaining and touching enough to garner well-deserved attention.

This time, Nemo and his dad Marlin (Hayden Rolence and Albert Brooks) are relegated to supporting roles as Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) tries to reunite with her long-lost parents.

Dory, you'll recall from the first movie, is a blue tang fish with short-term memory problems: Dory's disability causes her to be separated from her parents at the movie's outset. Can Dory ever remember enough to find her way home, home symbolizing all that is safe and good in the world of Disney?

Along the way, Dory meets a variety of new characters who become like a new family. These include Hank the octopus (Ed O'Neill), Bailey the whale (Ty Burrell), and a shark named Destiny (Kaitlin Olson). None of these characters are groundbreakers, but they're all serviceable and sometimes amusing.

Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton provide voices for Dory's parents.

The movie follows Dory as she travels to waters off the California coast. Once there, she discovers The Marine Life Institute, a facility where ocean life is rescued before being sent to an aquarium in Cleveland or returned to the ocean.

Directors Andrew Stanton and Angus MacLane offer the best visual diversions when the movie plumbs ocean depths.

The filmmakers also make a few bows to ecological issues; the closer Dory and friends get to shore, the more dangerous life seems to become. Images of debris-littered waters send a reminder about human carelessness when it comes to natural life.

The movie culminates with an action-oriented finale that feels overly cartoonish and anti-climactic, especially considering that it occurs after Dory reunites with her parents. It's likely, though, that the movie's primary audience -- i.e., kids -- won't care.

Dory's overall sweetness, its colorful ocean environments and its fine, jokey use of a recognizable voice (no, I'm not telling) make it a worthwhile dip into summer waters.

Predatory aspects of natural life in the ocean, by the way, mostly are avoided.

The 'American Pie' gang grows long in the tooth

American Reunion suggests it's time to abandon adolescence, but still wants to wallow in the humor that goes with it..

If there's a message in the lingering adolescence of American Reunion -- the post-graduate edition of the raunchy 1999 teen comedy American Pie -- it might be this: One never is too old to masturbate. Or maybe it's that jokes involving penises and bowel movements represent the high point of hilarity. What? You thought a reunion of the American Pie crowd would result in a display of Wildean wit?

This superfluous sequel brings the Piee- gang together for a 13th high school reunion. Jim (Jason Biggs) and Michelle (Alyson Hannigan) are married with a two-year-old son. But all is not bliss for Jason and the former devotee of band camp: Most notably, the couple's sex life has become so dull that each prefers masturbation to intercourse.

The rest of the group can be summarized quickly. A third-tier celebrity, Oz (Chris Klein) now works as a sportscaster at a lesser cable network, but is best known for having appeared on a celebrity dance show. He lost.

Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) claims to be a worldly adventurer; Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) is happily married, and Stifler (Seann William Scott) works as a temp at a high-powered investment firm, where the boss specializes in humiliation.

These former high school buddies reunite in their Michigan hometown. The guys hope the reunion will recharge batteries that have depleted since the onset of adulthood, the notion being that a weekend of rampant immaturity is just the ticket for lives that need a boost.

Directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, best known for their work on the Harold & Kumar movies, try hard to deliver the expected goods, forgoing any element of surprise for a steady and predictable stream of the same kind of ribald humor that made the previous two movies popular. If you need me to tell you more about how the Pie movies approach comedy, you definitely are not part of the movie's target audience, and don't need to know any more.

The Pie formula requires that attempts to recapture high school enthusiasms go awry, that the friends learn that it's better to be adults than to regress and that ... oh, who really cares? If you've been dying to watch Stifler engage in a gross-out act of revenge, here's your chance. Otherwise, party on elsewhere.

Sexual temptation ripples throughout the proceedings. An 18-year-old hottie (Ali Cobrin) wants to surrender her virginity to Jim. He used to babysit for her. Kevin can't help but take a second look at his old high school flame (Tara Reid), and Chris wonders whether his love for Heather (Mena Suvari) still smolders.

Despite a receding hairline, Stifler serves as the movie's vulgar centerpiece while the rest of the crew struggles to put over jokes, a somewhat laborious effort because they're all looking a little long in the tooth for this sort of adolescent romp.

Eugene Levy, a master comic actor, has the only reliably funny bits in the movie. Levy, who at one point smokes pot with Stiffler's buxom mom (Jennifer Coolidge), can fit into this kind of raunchfest and emerge with his honor intact.

American Reunion opens without serious competition in the comedy department, so it might make small splash at the box office, but I can't say that this third and belated helping of the series (American Pie 2 was released in 2001) did anything more than convince me that I've had enough.