Studio Ghibli has been fascinating audiences for decades, mostly as the main export of Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki. Ghibli is usually synonymous with excellence within Japanese animation, but The Red Turtle comes from Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit. The film is a dialogue-less tale of a nameless man who finds himself stranded on a deserted island with no escape and no companions outside of some feverishly pesky crabs and a red turtle. The red turtle transforms itself into a female companion, which leads to a son, and as the family grows together within the island, so too does the nameless man find peace with his formerly harrowing situation. The Red Turtle is really breathtaking filmmaking, a strong exercise in animated cinema, with a director and a screenplay dedicated to showing the true power and purity within the kind of hand-drawn images that Studio Ghibli is so beloved for. Of coarse, The Red Turtle is not hand-drawn, but its two-dimensional style still recalls the artistic complexity of Miyazaki and other Ghibli films. The narrative in The Red Turtle is a bit slight, and I wonder if it the film would have been better served with a 20-minute running time instead of 80, but the story is a wonderful fable about the cycle of life, a kind of whimsical Adam and Eve tale without the burden of spiritual condemnation. It’s a stirring argument for strong, non-Studio animation, where actual artistic ambition is still achievable.

 

Directed by Michaël Dudok de Wit