Confession time: this weekend I got stuck on a trivia question about my own memory. Who is Bailey in Finding Dory?
I've seen the movie. I could picture Dory, obviously. Marlin and Nemo, sure. Hank the cranky seven-armed octopus, absolutely — Hank steals every scene he's in. The sea lions on their rock, yelling at Gerald. All present and accounted for in my head.
Bailey? Nothing. A total blank. An entire main character, deleted from my copy of the film.
The answer, for anyone else drawing the same blank
Bailey is the beluga whale. He lives at the Marine Life Institute, the aquarium-rescue facility where most of the movie takes place, and he's voiced by Ty Burrell — Phil Dunphy from Modern Family, which makes instant sense once you hear it, because Bailey is basically an anxious aquatic Phil.
His whole deal: he took a knock on the head, and now he's convinced his echolocation — the biological sonar belugas use to "see" — is broken. The institute's doctors can find nothing wrong with him. Nothing is wrong with him. But Bailey believes, deep in his big squishy forehead, that he's damaged goods, and so he refuses to even try.
His neighbor is Destiny, a whale shark voiced by Kaitlin Olson, who is extremely nearsighted and keeps bumping into the walls of her own enclosure. The two of them bicker like siblings who've been stuck in adjacent tanks for years, because they have been. Destiny's running commentary on Bailey's drama — he is a beluga, the bump on his head is supposed to be there — is some of the funniest quiet material in the film.
The scene that brought it all back
I pulled up a clip to jog my memory, and the moment it started I was back in the theater. Dory is lost in the institute's pipe system. Destiny tells Bailey to use his echolocation to guide her. Bailey protests — it's broken, remember — and Destiny basically says: try harder.
So he does. His enormous forehead jiggles, he lets out this ridiculous strained "ooooooooo" sonar noise, and the movie visualizes the sound waves painting the pipe network in his mind. "This is amazing! Oooooooooo." He maps the entire system and talks Dory through it turn by turn, dodging Marlin and Nemo coming the other way.
The sonar was never broken. He just needed somebody to make him try.
The sneaky thing this movie is actually about
Here's what I never consciously noticed until I was re-reading about the film: nearly every major character in Finding Dory is working around something.
- Dory has short-term memory loss — the entire premise
- Nemo has his underdeveloped fin
- Hank lost a tentacle and is terrified of the open ocean
- Destiny is nearsighted and swims like a shopping cart
- Bailey thinks his sonar is broken, and it isn't
Pixar made a kids' movie where the cast is a support group. And Bailey's version is, I'd argue, the most adult one of the bunch. Dory's memory loss is real. Destiny's eyesight is real. Bailey's problem is that he believes he's broken — and the belief is the whole disability. That's anxiety, rendered as a beluga whale, in a film about a fish who forgets things.
No wonder the resolution isn't a doctor fixing him. It's a friend telling him to try harder, and the sonar working the moment he does. I'm not saying I teared up re-watching the clip. I'm saying I understand why the scene exists.
Why my brain deleted him
I've been thinking about why Bailey specifically got evicted from my memory while the sea lions — who have maybe four lines — got to stay.
My working theory: memory keeps set pieces and throws away connective tissue. Hank driving a truck? Set piece, kept. Sea lions defending their rock? Set piece, kept. Bailey and Destiny do the quiet structural work of the plot — they move Dory (and the story) from place to place, they carry the emotional theme, and almost none of it is a moment the way a truck-driving octopus is a moment. The characters who hold a film together are apparently the first ones my brain recycles.
Which feels unfair to the beluga. He's the one doing the emotional labor.
A few facts I learned on the way back in
- Ty Burrell (Bailey) and Ed O'Neill (Hank) are Modern Family co-stars — Phil and Jay, reunited as a whale and an octopus.
- The aquarium's PA announcer is Sigourney Weaver, playing herself, as a running gag. "And the voice you're hearing now is Sigourney Weaver." It never stops being funny.
- The film came out in 2016 — ten years ago. Ten years is apparently long enough to lose a whale.
So consider this my public apology to Bailey. Forgotten, then found again, and honestly the most relatable character in the entire movie: convinced he's broken, fully functional the whole time, one encouraging shove away from doing the thing.
If you haven't seen Finding Dory in a few years, the quiet ones are worth the rewatch. Who else have you forgotten was in it?
