Awesome wonder

‘The Red Turtle’ is a beautiful respite from the family pandering of most animation

When it comes time to vote in the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle awards each year, I always find myself struggling on the Animation category. I rarely seek animated films out except on occasion for this column. Left to my own devices I would never have watched “Finding Dory” or “Minions.” Oh God, I’d nearly forgotten “Minions.” 

I did seek out “Sausage Party”—a special case because I like raunch in any form. “Kubo and the Two Strings” was nice, “Zootopia” was fun, and when Pixar nails the right balance of humor, pathos and plot, such as with “Up,” it usually turns out great. But I’m neither an easily amused kid [editor’s note: that’s arguable] nor an on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown parent, and the virtues of most animated films are lost on me. 

So when I see something like Michaël Dudok de Wit’s surreal, sublime, and devastating “The Red Turtle,” I’m reminded that the form can be more than candy-coated pablum for undeveloped minds. Sometimes it’s awe-inspiring.

The film’s premise is simple: a nameless man adrift at sea during a tumultuous storm miraculously cheats death and becomes marooned on a deserted island. A verdant but desolate place, his only friends on the island are a gaggle of tiny crabs. Discovering a bamboo forest, he quickly decides to build a raft and attempt escape.

After cobbling together a seaworthy vessel, he sets sail, only to have the raft violently broken to pieces by a mysterious force. He returns to shore, builds another, and tries again and again—each attempt ending in failure.

On his last try he meets his nemesis—a large, red sea turtle that plaintively stares at him. Back ashore the man spies the turtle pulling itself across the bright sand and beats it to death with a piece of bamboo. The man begins another raft, but the guilt of his cruel vengeance begins to wash over him like a shameful tide.

A co-production with Japan’s Studio Ghibli (founded by the legendary Hayao Miyazaki), “The Red Turtle” bears the studio’s distinctive, elegant animation style and whimsical sense of fantasy. 

Told with almost no dialogue, the animation does most of the talking with subtle movements and expressions and breathtaking attention to detail as the fable—almost narcotic in its beauty—unfolds. The tone and atmosphere Wit establishes verges on the magical, as we get pulled further out by the undertow of the visual narrative. It’s not specifically Japanese, though it certainly feels so.

The film’s plot carries a sense of kami, a Shinto belief that all things have a spirit (and by extension a personality) whether a rock or a tree, a typhoon or turtle. They can be positive or negative, but the underlying ethos is a respect for the interconnectedness of all things in the natural and supernatural worlds.

Much like the American animated films of 2016, “The Red Turtle” is about life and death, love and family, but it weaves those elements together into an emotionally resonant fantasy full of wonder and grace. This is Wit’s directorial debut, though you would never know it.

For more from Joe, read his review of the horror anthology ‘XX.’