The Red Turtle washes over you like a cool breeze; pleasant, although the rave reviews of a life-changing experience may be a little overstated. The film is a co-production between Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit and the brains-trust of Studio Ghibli, as the crimson Totoro in lieu of the usual blue in the opening credits tells us. But you could learn that simply from watching the characters move and the sea shimmer in the opening sequence anyway; gone are the thick, clean anime-inspired lines of Ghibli's standard, the wide eyes and the fat limbs. And in their place, two black dots for eyes, a wiry frame drawn from thin lines, and an island setting that seems to be perpetually overcast. This is no island paradise - the backgrounds of sky, sea and rock are made of great swathes of watercolour washes, the dullness of blue and grey almost overbearing. No wonder that our protagonist is immediately searching for an escape. There are certain stretches of beauty amongst this: morning sun peeking through the gaps of a bamboo forest, and compositions of stark simplicity of a lone figure standing on the endless beach. Yet when night falls the film turns monochrome, and the harsh reality of waking up robs him of fleeting moments of serenity in his dreams.
So it has a confident vision of its tone, and even the cutesy hijinks of a cast of cartoon crabs doesn't deter it. Aside from a few anguished shouts it is all but a silent film, leaving the sound design and swirling score to do most of the emotional heavy lifting. This all feeds into the moment that the red turtle washes onto the shore helpless, and in a fit that shook me, he turns it onto its back, and stomps down angrily. It is at this point that a comparison to Kim Ki-duk's masterpiece Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is unavoidable. The vicious act is likened to that of a little monk's torment of three small animals, puncturing the quiet calm with sudden violence. They both draw our attention to the egocentrism of man, and make elliptical leaps through life in their editing.
But the broadness of this tale leads it to eventually stumble. Its silence allows the viewer to fill the gaps with whatever thematic metaphor that is most applicable, while the actual narrative remains thin. Halfway through, the film skips ahead in leaps and bounds until it lands into another typical fable about a creature living amongst men, able to feign being human but hearing their calling elsewhere. A tsunami strikes the island suddenly, leaving devastation in its wake; this might be the slot where Ghibli's usual caution on the power and unpredictability of nature could be inserted, but it merely replaces dullness with a greyer dullness, and they stagger on quietly. Later, the child merges with another giant wave, overlooking his parents with a sense of detachment, and the message is muddled further. There are two stories and not enough time to explore them.
I've seen the latter done better anyway, in Ghibli's own Princess Kaguya and the excellent Irish Song of the Sea. Consider a sequence from that film where Saoirse, the mixed offspring of a human father and a fabled selkie first dives back into the sea where she truly belongs. The watercolour animation swirls around her as if it had just been painted with wet brush, the sea springs to life in response to her touch. The moment is magical. Does The Red Turtle take any time out of its broad allegory to woo us like this? To sell us the fractured identities of these characters, and explore the potential of its medium? Let's put it this way: there's more charm in one of Dudok de Wit's eight minute shorts than there is in the feature length of The Red Turtle.
So it has a confident vision of its tone, and even the cutesy hijinks of a cast of cartoon crabs doesn't deter it. Aside from a few anguished shouts it is all but a silent film, leaving the sound design and swirling score to do most of the emotional heavy lifting. This all feeds into the moment that the red turtle washes onto the shore helpless, and in a fit that shook me, he turns it onto its back, and stomps down angrily. It is at this point that a comparison to Kim Ki-duk's masterpiece Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is unavoidable. The vicious act is likened to that of a little monk's torment of three small animals, puncturing the quiet calm with sudden violence. They both draw our attention to the egocentrism of man, and make elliptical leaps through life in their editing.
But the broadness of this tale leads it to eventually stumble. Its silence allows the viewer to fill the gaps with whatever thematic metaphor that is most applicable, while the actual narrative remains thin. Halfway through, the film skips ahead in leaps and bounds until it lands into another typical fable about a creature living amongst men, able to feign being human but hearing their calling elsewhere. A tsunami strikes the island suddenly, leaving devastation in its wake; this might be the slot where Ghibli's usual caution on the power and unpredictability of nature could be inserted, but it merely replaces dullness with a greyer dullness, and they stagger on quietly. Later, the child merges with another giant wave, overlooking his parents with a sense of detachment, and the message is muddled further. There are two stories and not enough time to explore them.
I've seen the latter done better anyway, in Ghibli's own Princess Kaguya and the excellent Irish Song of the Sea. Consider a sequence from that film where Saoirse, the mixed offspring of a human father and a fabled selkie first dives back into the sea where she truly belongs. The watercolour animation swirls around her as if it had just been painted with wet brush, the sea springs to life in response to her touch. The moment is magical. Does The Red Turtle take any time out of its broad allegory to woo us like this? To sell us the fractured identities of these characters, and explore the potential of its medium? Let's put it this way: there's more charm in one of Dudok de Wit's eight minute shorts than there is in the feature length of The Red Turtle.